


anthems for a seventeen year old girl

by warmfoothills



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Birthdays, Coming Out, Coming of Age, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Post-War, Shell Cottage, Trans Ginny, coming to terms, dodgy sports metaphors, fuck the weird book misogyny everyone gets healthy nuanced female friendships, ginny weasley’s summer of self-actualisation, no i am not writing fleur’s french accent phonetically just imagine it, sibling dynamics, the beach, the holy trinity of gay teen angst i guess!, the inherent intimacy of sitting in the bath while your best friend cuts your hair, tonks is nb but this is post-war so theyre only mentioned sorry, trans fleur, yes i also grew up as the youngest girl of seven and it probably shows
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-21
Updated: 2020-10-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:14:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27127727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warmfoothills/pseuds/warmfoothills
Summary: Luna’s here because it’s the first place she felt safe after weeks in the cellar. Ginny’s here because it’s where Luna is.
Relationships: Luna Lovegood/Ginny Weasley
Comments: 41
Kudos: 140





	anthems for a seventeen year old girl

**Author's Note:**

> hi! quick disclaimer before we get into it: a lot of ginny’s thought process here re: things like labels, comp het etc is drawn from my own experience but i’m a cis lesbian and i do not pretend to know what it’s like to be a trans woman. hopefully i’ve handled that side of things ok but any criticism/advice is always appreciated! fuck jk rowling, in this house we love and support trans women :~)
> 
> and on that note, if you like the fic, please [donate if you’re able](https://secure.actblue.com/donate/blacktrans-queer?tandembox=show) xxx
> 
> (title is from the broken social scene song of the same name. oh to be seventeen and feel like every song is written about you..)

**i.**

“Mum’s on the Floo again wanting to know when you’re coming home,” Bill says, head poked around the door of the spare room.

Ginny’s lying halfway off the side of the bed and has been for the better part of the morning, staring aimlessly at the opposite wall, so when she rolls her eyes they go floorwards. “I already told her. When I can have your old room.”

Bill huffs a laugh. “ _I_ said you could have it. Don’t know why she’s insisting on keeping it as a shrine to me.”

“Curse of the first born?” Ginny shrugs, as best she can in this position.

Bill pulls a face at her, upside-down and expectant.

“I know,” she sighs after a moment’s silence, well aware that Bill’s left it there for her to fill with a straight answer. “Just— tell her I’m still not ready yet.”

Bill nods but apparently can’t resist pressing a little. “You’re going to have to talk to her at some point, Gin. I mean, you know you’re— you can stay here as long as you like—”

Ginny cuts him off with a wave of one hand. “I _know,_ Bill. Please stop being all well-meaning and sensible and grown-up about it. Go appease our mother.”

He shakes his head at her with a grin, pulls the door closed behind him. Ginny lets gravity slump her off the bed until her skull thumps gently into the floorboards.

Six weeks since she’s been home. Since she took one look at her bedroom, at the dented kitchen table where she’s spent too many mornings to count, at the stairs going up and up and up, and decided she couldn’t stand to be there a second longer. She had her stuff thrown into a bag within five minutes of walking through the door.

Bill’s place was the natural choice — she could hardly move out on her own, still sixteen with no NEWTs or any idea how to go about getting a job that would pay rent, not even mentioning how mum would have literally tried to spellotape her to the wall if she’d tried.

George had offered, but moving into the empty, Fred-shaped space above the joke shop felt impossible, and going to Grimmauld with Ron seemed an equally bad idea for a whole list of reasons, not least the fact that Harry’s there, and she finds it hard to even be in the same room as him at the minute.

And Luna’s here, at Bill’s. Mum tried to get her to stay at the Burrow — even if her dad had survived Azkaban, their house had been blown up in circumstances Ron, Harry and Hermione are still cagey about explaining, leaving Luna with nowhere to go home to — but Luna’s always been good at getting what she wants. She’s very difficult to say no to, something Ginny can attest to all too embarrassingly well.

Bill, whose picture might as well be in the dictionary under the definition of laid-back, had no problem with Luna moving in, and Fleur adores her in a way that makes Ginny’s chest tight with some confused mix of resentment and envy, not sure who she’s actually jealous of. The only person who’d felt weird about the arrangement was Ginny herself, and that was mostly because the idea of Luna at Bill’s without her felt wrong. Strong aversion to going home and pretending everything’s normal aside, Ginny knew right away that she wanted to be at Shell Cottage. Bill is her brother, after all, and this is the house where she used to spend summers as a kid, and Luna’s _her—_

Well. The best friend she’s ever had, probably. The sister she _never_ had? Ginny’s still trying to figure it out.

All she knows is those weeks at the beginning of the year, the days where Luna was gone, taken from the train and kept captive, stretch dark and empty in her memory. A weird, numb panic had clouded everything. Ginny had barely eaten, hardly talked. Twice, after they’d been forced into hiding at Aunt Muriel’s, she’d tried to go looking for Luna herself, sneaking out of her new bedroom window in the darkness of the early morning. The second time it’d taken the combined efforts of her dad and both twins to drag her back inside.

But that’s— it was normal, wasn’t it? To have wanted so badly to help Luna? All anyone else had talked about was how Ginny had to think about her _own_ safety, like that mattered at all when Luna was out there, alone, maybe hurt, maybe worse. They’d kept such a close watch on her after the escape attempts that she hadn’t even been able to linger in the shower too long without someone knocking worriedly on the bathroom door.

And in the end, it hadn’t mattered anyway, because Luna had been rescued, just not by Ginny. Instead, by the three people that, apparently — and Ginny’s trying to stop feeling bitter about it, she really is — _were_ allowed to go off on their own, fighting evil and executing spontaneous recovery missions, though they’re barely a year older than she is.

So, whatever. Luna’s fine now, it’s all over, and Ginny’s dealing with it, mostly. It’s just— it’s not like her level of self-awareness is so low that she can’t recognise the huge, fuck-off obvious implications of the way she’d behaved when Luna was gone. How she’d paced the halls of Hogwarts for weeks on end, jogged round and round Muriel’s overgrown garden at least three times a day, incurably restless, unable to stop her feet from needing to move, and how, in sharp, revealing contrast, she never once considered going after Harry, the supposed love of her thus-far short, teenage life. Never tried to find her brother, or Hermione, never felt like her insides were curdling from not being able to do anything for _them_ , even though she’d worried about all of them, of course she had, all the time. She doesn’t know what it means that Luna’s absence left her feeling raw and exposed, like the top, protective layer of her skin wasn’t there anymore and Harry’s had felt almost depressingly normal.

Or, she does know, and she’s stubbornly choosing not to think about it. It’s easy, hidden here away from everyone bar the two people she can stand to be around, and the one person she never wants to be separated from again.

Not for any extended period of time, anyway. Ginny isn’t inherently clingy, not like how her mum gets panicked if she’s apart from dad for too long, or the way Bill and Fleur orbit each other, something like gravity in the way they’re drawn back together over and over. She can deal with it when Luna’s away — she has to, Luna’s not someone who can be made to stay put, always off exploring or out in the waves swimming no matter the weather. Ginny can’t see the appeal herself, it’s _freezing,_ even at the height of summer, and it’s not like flying, where you can wear as many layers as you want if you’re up above the clouds in subzero temperatures, but Luna’s always done it. She used to swim in the thick, bubbling stream back home all the time, in the lake when they were at Hogwarts. Ginny’d lost count of the number of times she’d been walking back from Quidditch practice only to spot Luna’s bright, white hair breaking the dark water.

Sometimes she goes down from the cottage and meets Luna on the shore, feet bare on the wet sand. Her skin is always cold from the water, salty, buffeted clean by the waves, hair tangled like seaweed, but she’s always smiling, too.

The thing about being apart from Luna now, is that Ginny knows she’ll come back.

The weather’s cool today, made colder by the strong wind blowing in off the coast and the heavy clouds in the sky. Luna’s out there regardless, but Ginny’ll wait until she makes her own way home, disinclined to leave the warmth of the cottage. Besides, her stomach is not-so-gently reminding her that she skipped breakfast, and her neck’s starting to cramp from where she’s lying at an awkward angle, so she makes herself move, pulls her body up off the floor and goes downstairs to see what’s happening with lunch.

Fleur is a nightmare in the kitchen, something she’ll happily admit to as long as mum isn’t around, so Bill’s the one who does most of the cooking. Ginny can hear he’s still busy as she passes the closed living room door though, so she keeps going, down the small, white-washed corridor, ducking under the drying flowers and herbs Luna keeps stringing from the already low ceiling. 

“He should be done soon?” Fleur says, pessimistic, like a question, when Ginny walks in. She’s standing in front of the open fridge, eyeing ingredients dispassionately.

Ginny snorts a laugh, and Fleur shoots a rueful smile at her. “Cheese?” she asks, spinning round with a whole camembert raised in question.

Ginny nods, takes the circle of cheese from her and turns on the oven. Fleur usually gets too impatient and just melts it with a heating charm, but they both know it tastes better slow-baked, so she fishes around in the cupboard for garlic, pinches some rosemary off the plant sitting on the windowsill and shoves it all into the top of the rind, throws it in the oven. Her culinary skills are honestly not much to write home about, but Fleur’s smile is still fond and grateful as she starts to slice up a loaf of bread.

They’re ok now, she and Fleur. Ginny knows, even with only a few months of hindsight, that she’d been in the wrong. Maybe it took a war to put things in perspective for her, or maybe she’s just been forced to grow up over the past year, but she can admit that it’s her fault it’s taken them this long to find an easy camaraderie, a way to be around each other.

It’d just been hard, at first, for her to see someone traditionally beautiful like Fleur, so elegant and talented and comfortable in her own skin, and not let the self-comparison bury her. To try and ignore the voice in her head that wondered unrelentingly if her life would be easier if she could be a woman like _that,_ strong but soft, feminine, refined.

The worst part — the thing that makes guilt crawl slowly up Ginny’s throat if she thinks too long about it — is that she knows Fleur initially thought of her as an ally, had hoped they’d get along like real sisters, until Ginny decided to be the world’s brattiest little _child,_ and steadfastly ignored all her attempts at being friendly.

Still, it’s fine, they’re fine. Ginny got over herself, and they’ve reached an understanding. Bill will sometimes joke about it now, Charlie and George, too, teasing Ginny for how she’d behaved, joking that she’d just been jealous she wasn’t getting all the attention from her biggest brother anymore, but Fleur never joins in. She knows Ginny better than Ginny likes to admit, and she forgave her for everything before Ginny had even been willing to acknowledge her head was too far up her own arse to realise she was being unfair.

It means they can do this, now. Sit opposite each other and dip chunks of bread into hot, molten cheese and laugh when Ginny gets it all over her chin, means they can talk and Ginny doesn’t have to worry about ignoring her mum next door because she knows Fleur won’t try and give her shit about it.

It also means, less fortunately, that Fleur feels comfortable enough to fix her with a knowing look when Luna walks in, damp and grinning, and Ginny’s whole body angles towards her without permission, but on balance, the embarrassment at being _perceived,_ the knowledge that someone else sees the way she reacts, unconsciously, to Luna, and isn’t angry or repulsed by it, is not so bad.

**ii.**

There’s a jacket hanging on the back of Ginny’s bedroom door that Tonks gave her three summers ago. The leather is Muggle, thick, creased with wear and dotted with patches, holes from the sharp pins of an adolescent-rebellion’s-worth of badges. It’s lined and too warm for June, but Ginny still puts it on sometimes, curled up in her bed, just to feel the lining on her skin.

She misses Tonks with a ferocity bordering on nausea.

It does not stop the resentment from rearing its ugly head more often than she’d like.

Everyone says the jacket suits her, Luna’s eyes hot and unreadable on her whenever she wears it. Ginny’s not sure about that — it’s still too big, cuffs hanging past her fingertips, even three years on — but sometimes she likes the way it sits on her body, like an exoskeleton, a suit of armour. Like Tonks is still there to wrap their arms around her.

Other times she can’t stand to look at it, afraid of the power it has to make awful, inexcusable thoughts clutter in her mind. Thoughts that whisper Tonks had it easier. That their ability to change their appearance whenever they liked meant they didn’t struggle the way Ginny did— _does,_ not really. In fourth year she spent hours and hours in front of the bathroom mirror, her brothers shouting at her from the landing to hurry up, trying to will her body into submission, to make it match how she felt on the inside. Tonks had _told_ her, so many times, that Metamorphmaji were born, not taught, but still Ginny had stood there, hoping, trying. Sometimes she looks at the jacket now and sees it only as a reminder that Tonks had found a way to exist, bravely, brilliantly themselves, and Ginny’s still searching.

Mostly, though, it’s just a jacket: a pile of fabric and stitching. Ginny knows that she’s not really angry at Tonks, she’s furious that they’re gone, and uncomfortable with the selfishness of that feeling, how it seems bitter and childish to want Tonks back just because they were the only person who made her feel like her mess was manageable. They left behind a son, for fucks’ sake, a baby who’ll have to grow up never knowing either of his parents, and Ginny had only known Tonks for a handful of years. She should be grateful she even got that much.

Doesn’t stop her thinking, though, that she’d tear the jacket to threads, run down to the cliffs and toss it out into the water for a chance at one more conversation with them. Fleur’s great, a confidante that Ginny never expected to allow herself to have, but she’s also married, happy, intimidatingly well-adjusted, and Ginny craves the comfort of someone who’s a little less put together. She can’t seem to shake the idea that only Tonks would satisfy that. Luna, too, maybe, but seeing as she’s who most of Ginny’s thought spirals these days are _about,_ Ginny can hardly go to her with this.

Luna likes to borrow her clothes, their wardrobes mingling and spilling out of drawers, off of hangers and into piles on the floor, but she never wears the jacket. Ginny’s grateful for that in a complicated sort of way. It would probably look good on her (everything looks good on Luna, everything of _Ginny’s_ looks good on Luna, better than it does on her) but it would feel weird, seeing her in it.

It’s starting to smell like her, though, the way everything is starting to smell like her: the sheets, the room, Ginny’s hair. Luna’s sugar-salt scent, sweet but cold, like spearmint or the sea, seems to permeate everything she comes within a two-foot radius of. Or maybe Ginny’s just overly aware of it, finding it everywhere because she’s seeking it out. That feels backwards — the longer they’re around each other, the more it should fade into the background, become familiar to the point where she doesn’t notice it anymore — but Ginny’s given up trying to make sense of the way her body always makes exceptions when it comes to Luna.

She wears the jacket to go and meet Andromeda down on the beach. They’re making a day of it, her and Luna and Bill and Fleur, showing Teddy the sea and giving Andromeda what small amount of respite they can from raising a two-month-old singlehandedly. The day isn’t cold, but Ginny feels like she needs the crutch of it, the support of the leather around her shoulders. If Andromeda recognises Tonks sewn into every inch of it, she doesn’t say anything. She just smiles at Ginny and tugs down Teddy’s blankets so Ginny can see his tiny little face.

“Hi,” Ginny says, soft. Teddy’s nose is exactly the same shape as Tonks’ was, when she wasn’t messing around with it. “Hi, baby.”

She’s never had strong opinions either way on children, not having been around them much as the youngest of seven, but it’s impossible not to be charmed by Teddy’s tiny, toothless smile, his waving fists. His hair is blue-green, sunlight on the sea, the colour Andromeda says he favours most often. Any resentment Ginny ever had over Tonks’ Metamorphmagus powers seems to melt into the wind. It feels beyond stupid to be jealous of a baby.

Luna talks to Teddy like she does everyone else, like he understands her. Maybe he does, what Ginny knows about early brain development could fit on half a scrap of parchment, but it’s unexpectedly sweet, Luna chatting steadily away to this infant as if he can follow the conversation, moreso than if she were making any attempts at the kind of baby talk Ginny’s heard from new parents. Teddy, for his part, is a very attentive listener. He even makes little gurgling noises in the appropriate places.

“Right?” Luna says to him, holding him in her lap, angling him out of the worst of the wind. “And they _still_ refuse to accept it, despite the eyewitness accounts—”

Ginny shifts, props herself up with her back to Luna’s shoulder, shielding the both of them with her body. The sun is warm and hazy on her face, the sand cooler when she sinks her toes beneath its surface layer. Bill has a book held open above him with one hand, and Fleur and Andromeda are talking quietly next to him. When Andromeda laughs at something and leans back in the sand, Ginny can see Tonks’ wide grin on her face, and she looks twenty years younger.

**iii.**

Ginny’s face-down on the bed, head pillowed in her arms, when Luna comes in and flops down on top of her.

“There’s a whole, person-sized space right there,” Ginny says, but she doesn’t shove her off. There’s also a whole other bed in the room next door, the one Luna’s supposed to be sleeping in every night, but they don’t use that either.

Luna grunts softly into the skin on the back of Ginny’s neck, her body a comforting weight. “Were you napping?”

“Nah,” Ginny says through a yawn.

“Working?” There’s a shift of soft hair over Ginny’s cheek as Luna leans over to eye the textbook Ginny had opened optimistically and immediately abandoned.

“Thinking about it.”

“You’re going back, then?”

School, she means. Ginny’s heard they’re aiming for a delayed re-opening, probably mid-October, for anyone who wants to finish or re-do their education, but she hasn’t made up her mind whether or not that means her.

She gives Luna a non-answer, a vague noise.

“It’s probably a good idea,” Luna says, but she sounds about as sure as Ginny feels. “I don’t know how they’re going to organise it all. Think they’ll keep the houses separate or just throw the re-takers in together?”

Ginny considers. It’s a nice thought, being able to continue what she has here with Luna at Hogwarts. She has friends in Gryffindor, of course, but sleeping alone every night, in an entirely separate tower to Luna, isn’t really appealing.

Still, Hogwarts has been run the same way for centuries. It’s unlikely they’ll change it now. “They’ll probably keep them. Tradition, isn’t it? Can’t imagine them scrapping the sorting ceremony completely.”

Luna hums in agreement. Ginny thinks about being eleven and standing in the Great Hall, terrified, not of which house she’d be sorted into, but at what the Hat might see inside of her head. She’d heard the stories from her brothers, the way the dormitories were split. She hadn’t really relaxed until she had her foot on the first step up to the girls’ dorms and seen for herself that it wasn’t about to throw her back down again.

Luna laughs suddenly, her thoughts clearly also straying back down memory lane, one running parallel to Ginny’s. “Remember when I tried to coach you so we’d end up in Ravenclaw together?”

Ginny snorts. They knew each other before Hogwarts, something people seem to forget, a happy side-effect of living so close and sharing not only their age, but an early, mutual determination to go out and explore the world outside of their houses. “I couldn’t even sit still long enough to listen to the end of the riddles you used to ask me.”

“Yeah, I remember.” Luna presses a fond smile into her shoulder. “You hardly ever sit still _now,_ I don’t know what I was thinking.”

 _You were thinking you didn’t want us to be apart,_ Ginny doesn’t say, because she’d thought the same thing. There had been next to no doubt she would end up in Gryffindor, but they’d played like the Hat might have made an exception. It wouldn’t have worked — Ginny can’t imagine having to try and engage her brain every time she wanted to get into her own damn common room, and Luna wouldn’t have been happy in Gryffindor, with the near-constant noise and tendency towards over-dramatics — but it’d been a nice fantasy.

Their friendship survived the separation, anyway. It’s Luna here with her now, not any of the people Ginny shared a dorm or an outdated set of supposedly defining characteristics with.

“I s’pose I _should_ get some qualifications,” she says, squirming when Luna sits up so she can push the window open and her weight redistributes to sit at the base of Ginny’s spine.

“There’s no _should_ about it. What do you want?”

 _You,_ Ginny thinks, stupid with it. _This._ They used to play at that, too, promising, pinky fingers linked, to find a house or a flat together after school, with the naive conviction of kids at sleepovers who think they’ll stay friends forever and nothing will change.

“There are things outside of academics,” Luna says, not waiting for an answer. “I don’t think a piece of paper from Hogwarts is what I need to be happy.”

“Don’t let Hermione hear you say that.”

“Hermione likes exams. They’re good for her.”

“And not for you?”

Luna might shrug, Ginny can’t see her. Her hands come down to steady herself against Ginny’s back, fingers digging slightly into the muscle there. The tightness in Ginny’s spine seems to give at the mere suggestion of Luna’s touch. “Maybe. School wasn’t exactly my favourite place, even before the war.”

Yeah, and Ginny’s still angry about it, the way Luna was treated. Hogwarts is a fucking wizarding school, steeped in enchantment and mystery, even for those like the both of them who’d grown up with magic — the nerve of people to act like Luna was crazy for believing in things, to whisper about her or tell her to her face how they thought she was weird, how she didn’t fit in, like she needed reminding. She _didn’t_ fit in, she was worth ten any of them, but she’d deserved to have friends before the DA in fourth year.

It was one of the things that had drawn Ginny all the more to Harry back then, how he’d never treated Luna like she was any different. How he’d been her friend, no questions asked. For a brief moment she wonders what he’s up to, locked away in that big house in London. She hasn’t spoken to him since Fred’s funeral.

“So let’s stay here,” she tells Luna, cutting that thought off before it can go any further, reluctant to relive that particular day.

Luna laughs again. “I think your brother might get sick of us eventually. They barely have any privacy as it is.”

Ginny pulls a face, hidden though it is in the dark cave of her arms. “Gross, Lu.”

“All I said was privacy, I wasn’t implying anything!” but Ginny can hear the smile in her voice. “Besides, this is their house and they’re _married,_ they’re perfectly within their rights to—“

“Nope, no.” Ginny sits up quick, dislodges Luna, who’s started giggling. “Don’t want to think about it.”

Luna laughs into the pillow from where she’s been tipped sideways. She fixes Ginny with a look, but lets it drop easily enough. “I don’t want to stay here forever.”

“Neither do I,” Ginny says, but she doesn’t know how to say the rest of it. That she wants to be wherever Luna is. Being stuck here together because it’s the place they’ve both chosen to process the aftermath of the war is one thing, actively telling Luna that she’s as willing to follow her anywhere as she was when they were seven is another entirely.

“School, then.” Luna tugs on her arm until she lies back down, the two of them side by side, shoulder to shoulder. “Or somewhere else. Whatever we want.”

 _We_ she says, easy as, like Ginny hadn’t just been having a minor crisis over the concept. It felt so simple as children, to plan a whole life together, because when you’re little you don’t think about things like jobs or marriage or wars. Love is what your parents press into you with warm hugs and kisses to the top of your head, is what you feel for your best friend. Uncomplicated.

Things could hardly be _more_ complicated, now. Ginny _knows_ she can’t stay like this forever. Luna will want to do things, go places, meet people, maybe. And Ginny—

God, Ginny should really at least _talk_ to Harry. There was a time when she’d planned things with him, too, sort of. Not in so many words — they’d left things in that weird, unspoken it’s-not-me-it’s-not-you-it’s-the-psychopath-who’s-trying-to-kill-me-and-might-use-you-to-hurt-me place — but she had thought, before everything, that they’d end up somewhere together, eventually. Now she has no idea what she wants. There’s a lot less pressure to the idea of hiding here with her best friend than trying to build some kind of grown-up, responsible life with Harry. To be the wife with the two-point-whatever kids and a job. Even the _word_ wife makes Ginny’s insides turn to ice. She’s not even of age yet.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Manchester,” Luna adds, thoughtfully.

“Manchester, right,” Ginny grins, rolling so her laugh tucks itself into the space between Luna’s shoulder and the pillow. She’d thought— other _continents,_ probably, far-flung places Luna would want to go and explore, but Manchester, fine, ok, they can absolutely start there. Is Luna ever going to stop surprising her? “We can do Manchester.”

**iv.**

The nightmares are new. Ginny never used to get them much, has always been a heavy sleeper, the type to pass out so early her dormmates teased her for falling asleep mid-conversation, missing out on after-hours kitchen raids or whispered midnight games of Truth or Dare. It never bothered her — she _likes_ sleeping, thanks, literally name anything better, and she used to get up early to go running before breakfast so she needed the early nights — but now she wishes she was a little more familiar with the black, uncertain hours of one, two, three AM. It might be easier, she thinks, to talk herself down when she wakes up, gasping into the dark, if she’d had any practice with it.

Luna helps. She’s up late into most nights, reading or drawing, staring out at the shadowed beach whilst Ginny drops off, or if not, she often wakes with Ginny anyway when she’s forced into consciousness by a bad dream. It makes Ginny feel guilty, a bit, Luna always being there to calm her down — really, _Luna_ should be the one having nightmares, after everything she went through — but she also doesn’t know what she’d do without her there to hold onto. She’s good at soothing Ginny back to sleep, rubbing her back like she’s a little kid again, sometimes singing, lullabies she learned from her mother or Muggle songs they hear on the radio.

She doesn’t ask about the dreams. Ginny wouldn’t be able to tell her if she did. The details never linger, just the underlying fear that sticks around in her stomach long after she’s woken up.

“I’d try taking something,” she says one morning, poking at the dark shadows under her eyes in the mirror, “if I wasn’t scared it’d just trap me in there.” She’d rather the nightmares wake her up, exhausted as she is, than be stuck in potion-induced unconsciousness, unable to snap herself awake.

“There’s always Dreamless Sleep,” Luna says. She’s flicking through the pile of clothes on the bed, deciding what to wear. Ginny can see her back in the mirror as she pulls her sleep shirt over her head, bare and pale. She looks away.

In response to Luna’s suggestion, she hums, not convinced. Dreamless Sleep gets expensive if you need it regularly, unless you can brew it yourself or get it on prescription from Mungo’s, and she’s worried about the implications of becoming reliant on it. The idea of having to go to a Healer and ask for medicinal help for something as trivial and childish as bad dreams feels weak for some reason, like admitting defeat. Logically she knows that’s wrong, that she’s being unfairly harsh on herself, but she can’t seem to shake the feeling.

When she risks a glance up at Luna again she’s covered up, a gingham sundress pulled over the top of one of Ginny’s t-shirts, a cardigan she’s pretty sure used to belong to Neville over the top of that. Ginny smiles, a small, secret one just between her and her reflection, at the layers, the mish-mash of patterns. How Luna never wears socks even though she owns about fifty pairs, all mixed up in their underwear drawer.

 _The_ underwear drawer. Just because they’re sharing a room doesn’t mean— it’s not _theirs._ Not in the domestic, cohabitation sense that the warmth on Ginny’s cheeks would imply. If anything it’s Bill and Fleur’s, like everything in this house is. But thinking about underwear in any context relating to her brother is enough to make her cringe and she has to shake her head to clear it, then gives up her under-eye bags as a bad job and gets up to follow Luna down for breakfast.

**v.**

On the first day of July Ginny throws herself down onto the floor of the upstairs landing, dramatic in a way she rarely finds the energy for anymore. “I’m cutting it off,” she tells Luna, swatting in irritation at the hair that somehow seems to fall into her face no matter what she does with it. “All of it, it’s going.”

Luna’s balanced on the small bookcase, feet carefully positioned between a vase of dried sea lavender and a little ship-in-a-bottle ornament (Bill and Fleur are, sort of hilariously, really leaning into the nautical theme), hanging a string of shells from the exposed beam in the ceiling. She collected them herself; Ginny watched her make tiny holes in them with a neat little boring spell and thread them onto brown twine.

“Ok,” Luna says, muffled because she has a couple of nails in her mouth and a hammer in one hand, the other steadying herself against the wall. Ginny wonders briefly at Bill and Fleur’s lack of any concern regarding her contributions to the interior decor, up to and apparently including knocking holes into the structural framework of the building.

“I mean it this time,” Ginny adds. Kicks her heels up to rest on the bannister so her body makes a right angle. If Luna slipped right now, Ginny’s perfectly positioned to break her fall.

“Ok,” Luna says again, eyes narrowing in concentration. They both know it’s not really Luna that Ginny is trying to convince. She’s been threatening to take a strong _Diffindo_ to her own head since she was old enough to hold a wand.

This time feels different, though. Like she might actually go through with it. She’s always found ways to talk herself out of it before, worrying how it will look, what it’ll do to people’s perception of her, especially considering the (widespread, outdated, nonsensical) views on hair length and its relationship to gender presentation, but she really needs something to change and it feels like a good place to start. If nothing else, she’ll at least be more comfortable, without her hair sticking to her neck in the summer heat.

There’s silence for a while save for the dull noise of the hammer, but it doesn’t take Luna long to finish the job to her satisfaction. “I’m coming down,” she says to Ginny, gesturing with a pointed toe for Ginny to shift out of the way.

Ginny does not move.

“I’m not jumping onto you,” Luna says. If Ginny stays where she is she’ll _have_ to — there’s not really any floor space left. Ginny grins up at her.

The bookshelf is only a half-height one, more of a decorative piece, two shelves, tall enough to enable Luna to reach the ceiling but not actually very high off the ground. She could hop off easily if the floor was clear.

“I weigh a lot more than I did when we were nine,” she says, leaning back against the wall. Ginny smiles wider, pleased that Luna’s remembering, too, how they used to climb so high up in the trees at the Burrow that Luna — always the one who wanted to go further, climb higher — would inevitably look down and realise she couldn’t get back again.

“I’ll catch you!” Ginny remembers promising, climb-falling down the tree, fingers slipping on the bark in her haste to get to the bottom, to stand underneath the branches with her hands outstretched. She’s not sure it actually hurt any less, Luna landing on her, than it would have if she’d just hit the ground, but they did it anyway. At least that way they _both_ got bruises and dirty clothes that had mum shaking her head at them in despair.

She lifts her arms like she had then, half-joking, half-hopeful, and Luna takes advantage of the narrow patches of carpet revealed by the movement, jumping carefully down so her feet land in them, either side of Ginny’s torso. Perfectly aimed — close but no actual contact made, until she steadies herself and the knob of her ankle presses barely-there into Ginny’s ribs. She stands there, just looking down at Ginny, probably seeing the disappointment that Ginny can’t quite keep off her face.

“Maybe when I’m not armed,” she says, holding up the hammer and nails she still has in both hands, then laughs at Ginny’s pout and steps away. Ginny’s rib goes into instant, ridiculous mourning.

She sits up in time to catch Luna’s smile as she goes downstairs to put the tools back wherever she got them from.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Ginny calls after her, and hears the responding laugh echo in the downstairs hallway. She falls back again and stares up at the shells, moving almost imperceptibly in an invisible breeze. A draft, maybe, or just the residual disturbance in the air from where Luna had been and now isn’t. Ginny feels like that too often, her body inhabiting the space around her differently when Luna’s gone, shaping itself around the absence.

When it comes to it, later that afternoon, they end up in the empty bath with the bedroom mirror balanced precariously between the roll-top and the wall, propped up with a scented candle and a wonky-at-best stablising charm. _They_ because for all her _Diffindo-_ related threats, Ginny can’t actually see the back of her own head, and doesn’t trust herself besides, to not completely fuck it up, and the bath because— well, it seemed like the easiest way to avoid too extensive a clean up, though Ginny’s second-guessing that now. There’s not a lot of room.

Luna combs Ginny’s hair out slowly with her fingers until it lies smooth and flat down her back. She doesn’t use a brush, just gets her hands right up in there, tugs out the tangles carefully, and Ginny’s throat burns. She’d expected Luna to say something when she handed her the scissors from the kitchen drawer, about how this would be a lot easier if they used magic, but she hadn’t. With every pass of her fingers Ginny knows she’s forgone the comb because she gets it, understands, implicitly, that Ginny actually needs this to be as non-magical and grounding as possible.

“You can have a lock of it, if you want,” Ginny jokes, nervous at the weird tension that’s settling over them, how disproportionately serious what they’re about to do feels compared to what it actually is. Just Luna, and a pair of scissors, and both of them squashed into the empty bath. “Put it in a necklace.”

It’s the kind of thing Luna _would_ do, but she only laughs. “You’re cutting it off,” she says, and Ginny can hear her smile soften, butter on hot toast. “Why would I want to keep something you don’t feel is you anymore?”

And, ok, _yeah,_ Ginny forgets Luna can be so— _Luna_ sometimes. She has this unnerving ability to say exactly what Ginny didn’t even know she needed to hear.

A scraping sound, metal against porcelain, as Luna picks up the scissors. “Ready?”

Ginny nods, looks down at her pretzeled legs, folded underneath her. She doesn’t look back up again until the base of the tub is littered with little auburn piles and Luna blows gently on the back of her newly-exposed neck, brushing her shoulders to get rid of any lingering hairs. The sensation is familiar, a sense-memory, summers spent in the Lovegood’s wildly overgrown rose garden, the floral scent sweet and thick in the air, insects buzzing lazily between the blooms and coming to rest on their bare arms, their muddied knees.

“Hold still,” Luna would say, and then blow carefully on whichever part of Ginny’s body the bee had chosen to land on. It was the best way to get them off without hurting them, she said, and it worked every time.

“Do you want to wash it?” Luna asks her. Ginny is still avoiding eye-contact with her reflection, so she twists herself around awkwardly and uses Luna’s reaction as a mirror instead.

Luna’s smiling, big and toothy and closer than Ginny was prepared for. Ginny immediately pulls a face at her expression and she laughs.

“It looks great!”

Ginny _hmm_ s, head tilting, not _not_ believing her — she’s pretty sure Luna’s never told her a lie in their entire lives — but. Acknowledging the bias, maybe.

“Really,” Luna urges. She puts both hands on Ginny’s shoulders, holds her there like it’s important she listens. “It’s very you. Sort of— quite hot, actually.”

Ginny must flush dark enough to match her hair because she’s suddenly warm all over despite how chilly the bathroom is and Luna laughs again, her shoulders coming up in a little shrug. Like she hadn’t exactly meant to say that but isn’t too bothered it slipped out. She doesn’t take it back.

“Wash— yes,” Ginny says quickly, slipping a bit with how fast she tries to get herself upright.

“Ok,” says Luna, unfolding herself more gracefully. She puts a hand back on Ginny’s shoulder for balance as she climbs over the side of the bath. “If you want me to help you dry it or anything when you’re done—”

Ginny knows her face is still bright red but she makes herself meet Luna’s eyes when she interrupts her.

“Or,” she says carefully. Swallows. “You could stay?” She gestures pointlessly at the bath beneath her. It’s not like she means— she’s just feeling a little weird and fragile right now and she doesn’t want to be alone. For Luna to leave her by herself with the mirror and her naked body and the opportunity to overthink this until she’s convinced herself it was a mistake.

Luna’s eyebrows climb up her forehead. To universal surprise, considering her love of the water and general— everything about her that suggests otherwise, she’s not actually a bath person. She gets bored, she says, sitting there with no current to battle or tide to chase. Ginny likes them, sometimes, finds them comforting, remembers being a kid and her dad changing the colour of the water, her mum tilting her head back gently to rinse her hair, but she’s not asking Luna to get _in_ with her, she’s just—

“I mean,” she adds, clambering out too so that she has an excuse to look away from Luna’s face. “If you wanted to hang out while I wash it?”

There’s a curtain, white and opaque, that she could draw around the bath to stop it being weird (it’s already weird, she knows it’s weird, who asks their best friend to sit in the bathroom to keep them company while they shower?) and she’s not going to actually run a bath, it’d just be five minutes, ten minutes tops, for her to stand under the spray and—

“Do you want me to do it?”

Ginny risks a glance back up and Luna’s huge eyes are narrowed slightly, thoughtful.

“What, stay? Um, yeah, Lu, that’s why I—”

“No,” Luna cuts in. “Do you want me to wash it for you?”

Which is how Ginny comes to be sitting on the bathmat with her t-shirt off, a towel wrapped around her shoulders, her neck against the lip of the bath and Luna kneeling over her so that she can wash the shampoo out. Bill and Fleur have one of those detachable shower-heads, which at least means Ginny doesn’t have to stick her head under the tap like a dog. She still _feels_ a bit like a dog, though, with how Luna’s hands in her hair make her whole body warm and pliable.

When they walk into the kitchen an hour later for dinner, Ginny unable to restrain her nervous energy long enough to stop raking her fingers through her new hair, Bill wolf-whistles and claps.

“Wicked!” he says. “Mum’s going to have conniptions.” He tightens his own ponytail with a grin and Ginny feels unexpectedly emotional at the immediate support, even over something as insignificant as her haircut.

Fleur smiles, too. “Very Parisienne,” she says, and gently tugs Ginny’s restless hand away by the wrist, tucks a stray strand behind her ear. Warmth blooms in Ginny’s chest and sits there for the rest of the evening, stoked gently by the way Luna holds her hand under the table for the whole meal.

**vi.**

“You know, this isn’t a prison,” Bill says from the shadows, making Ginny startle so badly she almost goes for her wand. It must be close to two in the morning and she’s just climbed out of her bedroom window into what she’d assumed was the deserted garden below. “You’re allowed to come and go as you please. There’s this thing called the front door—”

“Christ, Bill,” Ginny says in a furious whisper. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

Bill snorts. He’s sitting against the side of the house, propped up against the white stone wall. “Are _you_ trying to break your neck?”

Ginny scoffs, her heart rate slowly returning to normal. “It’s like, _barely_ a two storey house. Let a girl have her small rebellion,” which is easier than explaining that the creak of the bedroom door would definitely have woken Luna up, and it was simpler just to climb out of the already wide-open window and swing herself down that way.

Bill laughs at her, waves a hand in an _if you must_ kind of gesture.

“What are you doing out here anyway? Aren’t you working tomorrow?”

“Yeah, but. Couldn’t sleep,” Bill says. Ginny doesn’t need to look up and scan the dark sky to know the moon’s out and near full — he always struggles to drop off when it is. “What are you doing?”

“Going for a walk, maybe.”

“Mind if I join?”

She shrugs a no, so he pulls himself up. “Just— one sec,” and he ducks back inside.

“Leaving a note?” Ginny asks knowingly once he’s back, a spare jumper in his hands that she accepts from him with an eye-roll.

He shoves at her lightly, predictable as ever. “If I woke up and _she_ was gone with no explanation—” he starts, but Ginny only laughs.

“Sort of ruins the whole teenage spontaneity of the thing.”

“Ah, fuck that. I’m old.”

“You’re not _old,_ ” Ginny says, even though she teases him about whether he’s found any grey hairs yet at least once a week. They push through the little gate at the end of the garden and out onto the path that leads down to the sea.

“Not a teenager, though.” Bill pulls a face. “Thank Merlin. Wouldn’t go back to that for all the gold in Gringotts.”

“Yeah,” Ginny says, quiet, like she isn’t still there. Stuck in that inbetween lost-childhood, not-quite-adult phase. She shivers a tiny bit in the cool night air.

“Put it _on,_ ” Bill says, long-suffering, noticing.

“Stop mothering me,” Ginny complains, but she’s grateful for the extra layer despite herself as she pulls the jumper over her head. The sleeves hang down past her hands and she clenches her fingers in the fabric, secures it with her fists so the sharp breeze can’t get in.

“Someone has to.” Bill has his own hands shoved in his pockets.

Ginny maturely chooses to ignore that less-than-subtle dig at how she still hasn’t spoken to their mother. “Or you could all just— let me be,” she tries, shooting a look at him. She had to tilt her head all the way back when they were younger but the distance is less pronounced now. Still present, though, which feels reassuringly normal. She can’t imagine a world in which she isn’t looking up at Bill.

“I was _there_ for the war, you know,” she adds, letting some petulance colour her tone. She likes that she can play into the whiny little sister thing a bit with Bill and know that he’ll counter it how he always has — maybe tease her, pretend he’s more annoyed than he ever really is, but never actually call her out on it. “I managed perfectly fine last year without any of you around to baby me.”

Bill takes up his expected role for a moment with an eye-roll and a knock of his arm against hers, but then he surprises her by turning suddenly serious, frowning in the moonlight. “Yeah,” he says, thoughtful. “But you’re still a kid, Gin. I know you don’t want to hear that—” he adds quickly, before she can argue, “but you are. And— I don’t know. Just because you _did_ manage fine on your own, doesn’t mean you _have_ to. Especially now.”

Ginny— does not know what to do with that. Has never thought about it that way before. She’s always been so focused on proving herself, proving that she was ok, she was strong, she could keep up with her brothers, could hold her own against all those weirdo blood-purists double her age who were hell-bent on killing her or her friends, that she’s literally never considered whether she actually wants the fierce independence she’s been desperate to show everyone she’s capable of.

“Huh.” She considers for a moment. The sand underneath their feet is turning solid, wetter and more compact the closer they draw to the shoreline.

“I’m just saying,” Bill holds up his hands, still in his pockets so the gesture gets muffled by his jacket, “none of us really think you need looking after. We know you can give any of us a run for our money, always could, but it’s ok to let people care about you. It’s not going to kill you.” He gives her a wry half-smile.

Ginny sighs, over the top, a conspicuous mask for how hard his words hit at something small and tender inside her chest. “Whatever,” she huffs. “I miss pre-therapy Bill.”

He barks out a laugh, short and loud against the backdrop of the waves. She doesn’t mean it, obviously, she sees every day how much better he is for deciding to start talking to someone after the attack, and, really, they should all be in therapy after everything that’s happened. Hell, Hogwarts should probably add it to the core curriculum.

“Eh, pre-therapy Bill would say the same,” Bill tells her, smiling. “I’ve always been boring and sensible, sorry.”

“You have not!” Ginny slaps at his upper arm in indignation. “I still remember mum’s face when you said you were moving to Egypt. Fred and George wanted to have a portrait commissioned.”

It’s still painful to mention Fred but worse, she thinks, to _not_ , to cut him out of memories or tiptoe around the gaping hole he’s left. Saying his name is a good kind of hurt, like pressing on a bruise.

Bill grins, tilting his head in acquiescence. “Ok, yeah, but we weren’t at school together. You don’t remember how much of a swot I was.”

“As soon as you graduated you went straight into a career that involved actively seeking out curses, William,” Ginny counters, deadpan.

“But I was a Prefect before that! And Head Boy.”

“You had an _earring_ with a _fang_ on it.”

That apparently has him stumped, because he laughs so hard he stops for a second. “Shit, yeah, alright,” he says. “I’ll give you that.”

“God, Harry thought you were so cool the first time you met,” Ginny laughs, remembering how insanely jealous she’d been that summer, more than just the usual tag-along envy that came with Harry being _Ron’s_ friend and not hers, not yet, not really. He’d gone on and on about Bill, and Charlie, too, how cool they were, how fun it must have been to have them as older brothers, until even Ron had told him to give it a rest, embarrassed.

Bill hums pointedly. “Harry?” he says, evenly. “How is that—?”

“It’s not,” Ginny cuts in. Keeps her eyes forward so she can’t see the look Bill is giving her.

“Have you—?”

“No.”

Bill laughs again. “Are you going to let me finish a question?”

“Nope,” Ginny says, swinging her arms. She loves Bill, but there are some things she doesn’t really want to talk about with her older brother, no matter how close they are. Plus, she doesn’t even know what there is to say. She’s not thinking about it.

“Ok, message received,” Bill says, lengthening his strides to catch up to where she’s hurried forward unconsciously in her discomfort, like she can avoid the conversation if she puts some physical space between them. “For what it’s worth, though,” he hedges, “I always thought you were too good for him.”

She looks at him, dubious.

“Seriously! You know I think Harry’s great, love him like a brother, owe him my life and so on and so forth—” Ginny bites out a shocked laugh at that, the casual reduction of everything Harry’s done down to a throwaway comment — “but he’s not, like— the be all and end all. And you deserve the be all and end all.”

“Besides,” he adds, before Ginny can do anything embarrassing like get choked up. It’s the wind, is all, and the lack of sleep, making her eyes water. “No offence to the guy, but I never got the appeal, y’know, looks-wise. He’s a bit sort of— scrawny, isn’t he?”

Ginny _shrieks._ “Oh my God, Bill, I am _not_ talking about this with you.”

Bill’s laughter follows her all the way up the dark beach as she jogs ahead again, face flaming but head clearer than it has been in days.

**vii.**

They spend a lot of time wrapped up in each other, she and Luna. Ginny’s not sure it’s normal but it’s not like she’s going to check with anyone, too scared of the answer. It means she knows the ins and outs of Luna’s body better than her own, in more detail than she’s ever cared to study anything, save maybe memorising Quidditch plays, and the catalogue of information sits in her head, unconsciously updating every time she discovers something new.

She really loves the softness of Luna’s stomach, the pale hair on her legs, her arms. She wants to stroke it, feels hot and embarrassed about it even as she craves it, wants to press her teeth gently into Luna’s bony shoulder, to lie there, limbs so tangled that she can look down at a thigh, an elbow, and not know which of them it’s attached to, even though Luna’s skin never browns in the sun and Ginny’s own just goes pink and freckly.

The things she wants scare her sometimes, like Luna would be freaked out if she knew. _Ginny’s_ freaked out and it’s her own head. She doesn’t think it should feel like this, like she wants to crawl inside of Luna. They’ve always been closer than most, joined at the hip since they were kids and never shy with their affection, but the lines have started to blur. She can’t figure out how much of this is ok, where it starts getting weird. What’s acceptable best-friend behaviour and what’s taking it too far.

On the worst days it feels like she’s lying to Luna, almost. Feels disrespectful, to think about her in any capacity without her knowing, to have all this knowledge stored, to depend on these quiet, intimate moments more than she’s letting on. Luna doesn’t push her away, never has and doesn’t start now, and that’s _worse_ somehow, makes Ginny feel like she’s taking advantage.

They don’t talk about it much, on the whole, but Ginny brought it up once. When Luna’s feeling lazy, or having a bad day — the kind Ginny can relate to, days they all seem to get since the end of the war, where everything is too much effort — she doesn’t even bother drying off properly when she comes in from her swim, just climbs into bed where Ginny’s inevitably already situated with her cold, wet hair, and gets the sheets all damp. (And that’s abnormal, too, the amount of time Ginny spends lying in bed, staring unseeingly at the ceiling. She’s always had so much energy, and too frequently now she feels slow, exhausted by the smallest things.)

“Were your parents like this?” Ginny asks, staring down at where Luna’s linked their fingers together.

“Like what?”

Ginny lifts a shoulder in a shadow of a shrug. “Tactile.”

Luna considers. “I guess not,” she says, confirming Ginny’s half-formed suspicions. “I mean, they got distracted easily.”

Ginny doesn’t push. Her own family is pretty touch-oriented by nature, sometimes to the point of annoyance, big on hugs and hip-checks and friendly elbows to the ribs. She knows it comes with the territory of a big family and that Luna growing up an only child probably factors into why she’s not so used to it. She never really had anyone around to be like that with, except Ginny.

It’s just interesting to think about, the two of them coming from opposite ends of the spectrum and still ending up here, octopus-ed together every night, grounded by the closeness.

**viii.**

It’s been so long since Ginny’s seen her mum that when she finally agrees to it, midway through the month, she’s scared it’ll be bad. That her mum will be angry, and rightly so, at how Ginny’s avoided her, especially now, with their family one less and everyone scattered, disjointed.

Mum comes to Shell Cottage because Bill, ever the mediator, thinks it’ll be easier for Ginny if she doesn’t have to go back to the Burrow just yet. She brings Charlie and George with her and she wraps Ginny up in a hug as soon as she’s out of the fireplace, holds her there for so long that Ginny forgets to be worried that she’s ruined everything. It’s _mum,_ she reminds herself, feels like an idiot for ever thinking that meant something other than total acceptance, than safety, than the smell of lavender and laundry spells, familiar since childhood. Just her mum, whose priority has always been split seven ways between her children and hasn’t ever meant any less because of it.

“Hi, mum,” Ginny breathes into the warm circle of her arms, the two of them of a height these days.

Her mum says nothing, just clings to her until George complains loudly and wiggles an arm between them, breaking them apart so that he can give Ginny his own hug, so tight he lifts her off her feet. The physicality of it, the reminder that her family is there, solid, tangible, hits her like when you open the oven door, a blast of warm air.

“Going for a new look?” Charlie grins, once George has set her down again, laughing. He pulls her into a headlock and scrubs roughly at her scalp with a fist. Ginny stamps on his toe with no remorse until he lets her go, backs off laughing, hands raised in surrender. “Woah, woah, calm down, turtle. I like it!”

It’s a stupid nickname, one he hasn’t called her in ages, some derivative of a derivative (it had been gingersnap when she was tiny, a name that’s been switched and shortened so many times she can’t even remember how it evolved into the snapping turtle thing) and it makes nostalgia curl, begrudging but welcome, in her stomach. She sticks her tongue out at him, then turns with slight trepidation to mum, who’s not-so-subtly wiping her eyes.

“What d’you think?” Ginny asks, her genuine anxiety at her mother’s reaction making it come out defensive, harsher than she’d like.

There’s a brief pause, a calculating look from her mum.

“You look like—” she starts to say, then cuts herself off with a hand over her mouth.

Ginny glances between her and Charlie, braced for a comment that’ll cut right into the soft, vulnerable parts of her self-esteem, but mum doesn’t seem angry, or disappointed.

“Oh wow,” Charlie says, blinks. “Yeah.”

“Yeah _what?_ ” Ginny huffs.

“Freddy,” Charlie says and mum nods, fingers still pressed to her mouth, eyes shining.

“Oi,” George pipes up. “Surely if she looks like Fred, she looks like _me,_ we’re _identical—_ ” (and he still uses the present tense when it comes to Fred. Ginny doesn’t think he should ever have to stop, no matter what the fucking Mind Healers say).

Mum laughs and it’s wet but real, a full smile threatening at the corner of her mouth. “Oh, I know, it’s just with the two of you like that— I mean, she _does,_ George, look at her,” and then Ginny’s being spun around and shoved face to face with George.

It’s— well, she can see it, actually, now that she’s looking. She and the twins and Charlie have always been the stocky ones, not tall like Bill or lanky like Ron and Percy, and now her hair’s short and she and George are almost the same height..

“Huh,” George says, then winks. “Guess the eternal joy of pretending our mother has mistaken us for the wrong child may yet continue.”

The flash that appears on George’s face, just for a second, of who he used to be, unburdened by grief and eager to be a bit of a shit, just for the fun of it, makes Ginny’s breath swim in her chest. It should bother her maybe, being compared to her brother — her _dead_ brother, no less — but she feels more herself than she ever has, and it seems right, weirdly.

Mum huffs and Ginny knows she’s rolling her eyes without having to look.

Charlie shoves at George’s shoulder, grinning. “Yeah, nice try. You forgetting something?” He gestures at the side of George’s head where his scar sits, mostly hidden by how his hair has grown around it.

“Sorry?” George asks, hamming it up. “Didn’t catch that. You have to talk into the ear that’s still _connected_ to my head if you want me to hear, Charles—” which starts a stupid shoving match between the two of them, like they never grew up past the ages of five and eleven, respectively. Ginny shares an exasperated look with her mum, but they’re both smiling harder than she can remember them doing for weeks.

“Also,” she adds, over George loudly threatening to cut Charlie’s ear off and have it magically attached to his own head, “I have tits.”

Her mother makes a disparaging noise. “Oh, Ginny, honestly, it’s such a _vulgar_ word—”

“I can have those magically attached too, you know,” George says, and Ginny slaps him upside the head as he cackles.

**ix.**

Ginny Floos to London from the fireplace in the back room. She doesn’t have her apparition licence yet — one of the many casualties of a school year spent fighting for her life rather than learning anything useful — and it’s too far to fly there and back in one night. That’s what Luna tells her anyway, says it’s going to rain and gets Fleur to back her up when Ginny insists it’ll be fine. She concedes with bad grace, even though she knows Luna’s just worried for her, and steps into the flames with the press of Luna’s goodbye kiss burning warm and mollifying on her cheek.

She likes Muggle London, the noise and the movement. Wizarding Britain is small by comparison, and there’s something equal parts comforting and thrilling in the bustle, how easy it is to get lost in it. Might be something of her dad in her, but she likes to watch people going about their lives, oblivious to the magical world around them.

Plus, as Pansy says, if the Muggles know how to do one thing right, it’s booze.

Pansy’s a— recent development. Against her better judgement, Ginny sort of got used to having her around last year. She’d still been awful back then but her heart hadn’t really been in it, and it only took a couple of detentions together for Ginny to realise she was just as scared as everyone else, more, even, and that she needed someone who wasn’t brainwashed by the fucking Death Eater regime to be her friend. It’s not Ginny’s shtick usually, the needing to help people thing — leave that to Harry, or Luna — but Pansy had been just mean enough to snag Ginny’s interest, and they’d fallen into a weird, half-friendship by Christmas.

She was still off-puttingly Slytherin, of course, preoccupied with herself above anything else, but Ginny had also caught her helping first-years when she thought no-one was looking. Stealing food to take to students who were too scared to leave the common room or Confunding the Carrows under her breath as they ran down corridors, so that they’d get lost and forget who they were supposed to be chasing. Just because she’d chosen to continue with classes and kept her mouth shut more often than not, didn’t mean she hadn’t tried to resist, in her own way. They couldn’t all be out and proud heroes.

And there was the— other thing, too. Something deeper and more vital, that cemented them together as friends the way only shared secrets can.

Pansy didn’t like boys, a fact she’d confessed to Ginny one night when they were sitting in the Owlery, faces numb with cold, surrounded by bird shit and the starless, frozen November sky, passing a bottle of stolen Firewhiskey between them. Ginny still doesn’t know why it was her that Pansy chose to confide in, but she remembers thinking it important at the time, feeling undeserving and honoured.

They mostly meet up and drink, now, which is probably unhealthy, but feels like enough of a stereotypical teenage experience that Ginny revels in the normalcy of it. Somewhere along the line, sitting in a random Muggle pub with Pansy and making fun of everything together, pretending the war never happened, became one of her favourite things to do.

Tonight is no different: Pansy hugs her on sight and then immediately starts bitching at her for cutting her hair and “making those fucking cutglass cheekbones even more obvious, Circe’s left and right tits _both,_ Weasley, I’m supposed to be the hot one in this friendship”.

They ignore everyone in the Leaky, walk arm in arm out into Charing Cross. Ginny thinks about Pansy’s greeting as she talks for the both of them, not needing more than the occasional interjection from Ginny to show she’s listening. Pansy _is_ attractive, is the thing, the traditional beauty of her face enhanced into something more interesting by the shape of her nose, the heaviness of her eyebrows. Ginny’s aware of it in the same, generalised way she thinks every girl she knows is pretty, but after all the introspection she’s been indulging in lately, for the first time she frames that awareness next to how she feels when she looks at Luna. There’s something different there, but she can’t pinpoint what it is.

Pansy complains about her overbearing mother the whole time she’s steering Ginny inside and ordering them drinks (they’re both underage by Muggle standards but the kind of places they frequent are never too concerned with the law; it usually only takes the barman one look at Pansy’s impatient face before they get served, no questions asked). It's a subject they’ve found common, commiserative ground over in the past but Ginny feels a little guilty about it now, considering how well the reunion with her mum went. Pansy’s mother really _does_ sound like a nightmare, though, so Ginny feels no remorse joining Pansy in slagging her off, even if she’s never met the woman.

“Anyway,” Pansy says, taking a breather to pull on her straw for a long moment. “I just need to convince Daddy to _sign_ the damn thing over to me and I can move out.”

It’s busy, so they’re sitting up at the bar, tucked together on rickety stools. “ _Daddy,_ ” Ginny parrots, derisive. “Posh twat.”

“Uncultured plebeian,” Pansy shoots back easily. They grin at each other, knocking elbows.

“So,” Pansy nudges. “What about you? Still at your brother’s? Avoiding the boy wonder?”

Ginny groans and leans more heavily on the bartop, sticky under her folded arms. “Ugh, let’s not,” she sighs. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Fine by me,” Pansy says. “I had enough of that living with Draco for six years. I probably know more about Potter than _you_ do, at this point, the way he went on.”

Ginny laughs, momentarily distracted. “He was—?”

“Obsessed?” Pansy cuts in. “Yes.”

Ginny can’t in good conscience say that she doesn’t know the feeling, fixating on Harry for so long, but the idea of having anything in common with Malfoy puts a bad taste in her mouth. She drinks to wash it away, swallows down her nerves and says: “It’s just. I’m starting to think this maybe isn’t— um. A Harry thing. Necessarily.”

She _doesn’t_ want to talk about Harry, but bringing up everything else, all that’s been cluttering up her head all summer, the things she really wants to ask Pansy— well. She has to start somewhere.

Pansy’s eyebrows go up, arch and perfectly shaped. “And by _this_ you mean the fact you’ve done literally everything in your power to not have to see Potter save putting a Fidelius charm on yourself.”

Ginny rolls her eyes. “You know that’s not how the spell works. And— yeah. I don’t know. I feel like it probably means something that I’m not jumping at the chance to even _see_ him.”

“Probably,” Pansy repeats, amused.

“Shut up,” Ginny whines. Her insides are squirming but she makes herself sit still and upright on the stool. “I’m just trying to— I don’t know. Work it out.”

Pansy hums, waiting, sets an elbow on the bar, props her head up with one hand.

“If it’s not a Potter thing,” she prompts when Ginny doesn’t elaborate, gentle as she ever can be, “do you think it might be a— men in general kind of thing?”

“No,” Ginny tries, the knee-jerk response, but she doesn’t sound convinced even to her own ears. “Yes? Maybe? I don’t—”

“It’s ok either way,” Pansy says. To the point, tone brooking no argument.

“Yeah, I get that, I just—” She can’t finish, doesn’t know what she’s trying to say. She’s so fucking _bored_ of saying “I don’t know,” even though it’s the truth, the only thing that she _does_ know: that she’s confused and can’t find the words to explain why.

Pansy stares at her for a moment, calculating. Then, with the same unnerving perceptiveness Luna’s too good at, she says exactly what Ginny needs her to. “You know, just because you thought you liked boys your whole life, doesn’t mean you have to _keep_ liking them.”

Ginny really wants to believe her. But something still feels— off, contained, like she can’t let herself make that leap. It’s different for Pansy, who hadn’t spent half her life infatuated with a boy, based too much of her identity around it.

Like she’s read her mind, Pansy says casually: “I thought I was in love with Draco for years, you know.”

Ginny feels her eyebrows draw down, skeptical.

“Really,” Pansy snorts. “Like— I do love him, he’s a bit of a cock, obviously, but— cauldron, kettle, you know. And we’ve been friends for so long I don’t know what I’d do without him. It made sense to be into him at school, because I thought that was what I was supposed to do.”

“You didn’t actually date, though,” Ginny points out, taking her eyes off the bar to look at Pansy. “You didn’t sleep with him.”

“No. Turns out Draco and I have far too much in common to be compatible.” She laughs at her own joke, then sobers slightly, shrugs. “But I slept with Blaise. And that complete idiot in your year.” She pulls a face. “What was his name? Harper?”

“Fuck off, you did _not._ ”

Pansy grimaces. “Unfortunately. Anyway, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

Ginny watches her take a sip of her drink, mouth around her straw, notices how her nail polish is chipped on several fingers. The glitter in it catches the low light.

“Sometimes,” Pansy says after a moment, “I think I just liked that someone wanted me. When I think about it now, I wasn’t really attracted to those guys, even then. I just liked the way _they_ were attracted to me. Does that make sense?”

Ginny makes a nothing-y noise, quiet and thoughtful.

“And I knew nothing was going to happen with Draco, obviously, so it was kind of— safe? I guess? To tell myself that I liked him when I knew I wouldn’t have to do anything about it,” she goes on, then laughs again, self-deprecating, like she despairs at her past self. “But I was still hurt by his rejection and like— sixteen and a huge drama queen, so. I went straight to the closest person who _did_ want me.”

And Ginny— her instinct is to say that she can’t relate, that she _had_ liked boys, even before they’d shown any interest in her, but she makes herself stop and really think about it for a second. Actually unpack the feelings that she usually just takes at face value.

She never slept with Michael Corner, though he’d tried to tell the whole school what a slag she was when she dumped him, or with Dean, a pathetic amount of _that_ relationship built on the mutual understanding that neither of them could have who they really wanted. (Or so they’d thought then, at least. The last time she saw Dean, he was sitting with his head in Seamus’ lap on the cracked floor of the Great Hall, the dust from the battle still settling all around them. But hadn’t Ginny, too, gotten the happy ending she’d thought she wanted, sooner even than Dean had? Wasn’t Harry supposed to be the endgame in all of this?)

The problem is, she’d liked Harry before she was even old enough to go to Hogwarts. Such a significant chunk of her life that it started to feel like a part of her, just another characteristic: Ginny Weasley has red hair, brown eyes and an undying love for Harry Potter. The concept of wanting to be with him became commonplace to the point where she just went with it, not stopping to think and reassess whether it’s actually still true or not. And now she’s letting herself do that.. well, it’s sort of obvious. Embarrassing that she didn’t realise sooner.

Because she can see, now that she’s looking, that once she had Harry, all the fun had gone out of it. The wondering and daydreaming, all those attempts to get him to pay attention to her. It feels awful to admit, even in her own head — because she _had_ loved Harry, _does_ love him, just maybe not quite in the way she thought — but she thinks part of her saw him as some kind of certificate, like a badge that proved she could be normal. That she could be wanted by someone as sought-after and important as him.

Oh, but she’d been happy. She still remembers what his mouth tasted like and how it felt, back in fifth year, to walk down corridors with him, hand in hand. They never had the time or the privacy for much when they were together, but he’d been the first person she’d done anything like that with, archaic and inane as the concept might be, and he was sweet, and kind, and they’d laughed a lot, and she’d wondered when it was going to hit her, all those feelings people talked about. Being with Harry had been nice, but it’d also _just_ been nice.

When she looks up at Pansy, sure her face is dazed and slack from a personal epiphany she wasn’t expecting to have tonight, Pansy grins wide.

“Oh,” Ginny says and Pansy laughs at her.

“Right?” She flicks her hair over her shoulder. “ _Oh_ about sums it up.”

“But how did I— I mean, how did I _miss_ that? How did I not know?”

“Heteronormative society’s a bitch,” says Pansy cheerily. Her eyes are kind on Ginny’s, patient while Ginny sorts through the tangle of her thoughts. A lot of things are starting to make sense in light of this new information. How she’d felt watching Angelina Johnson in a Quidditch match. The time in third year when a Beauxbatons girl smiled at her and she’d promptly knocked her pumpkin juice over. Her hero-worship of Gwenog Jones that she’s always written off as silly, schoolgirl admiration. Luna, Luna, Luna..

Every time she’s looked at a girl and had that _something_ happen in her stomach, she’s dismissed it as wanting to be _like_ them, not wanting to _date_ them. Has she really been oblivious this whole time? Has she not seen it for what it was, because it didn’t look or feel the way she thought it was supposed to, the way she’s used to, the way it was with boys?

“What the fuck,” she says to Pansy, slumping back in her chair. “I thought I just had a serious jealousy complex about every girl I’ve ever met.”

Pansy laughs again, head thrown back. “Yeah, I get that. Hard to distinguish between ‘wish I was her’ and ‘wish I was _under_ her’.”

Ginny blushes, can’t help it. She’s never let herself— even _thinking_ about girls in that context felt wrong, predatory, somehow, like she’s objectifying them. Just the other day she’d squirmed with guilt at the way her body reacted to Luna’s, even as they were both wrapped in each other, Luna very obviously ok with the level of contact.

But aside from that, what does this mean for _her,_ Ginny, if she wants girls in that way? Does she still like boys, too? Does she have to choose? She knows there are people who can love both, can love all genders. Hell, Tonks had found Remus, hadn’t they? And her past relationships weren’t horrible. Far from, in fact. But trying to imagine herself with someone now, in the future, she can really only picture it being a girl. Can only picture — specifically, embarrassingly — long, dirt-blonde hair, wide eyes, bitten nails.

Pansy’s still watching her carefully. Ginny suppresses an eye-roll at the expression on her face. People keep doing that lately, waiting for her to talk about her feelings. Stupid, functional support network. “So,” she says after a moment. “You’re saying I might be—”

She struggles to get the word out, and she doesn’t know why. In some ways, admitting that she wants Luna is easier than admitting what that means. Than admitting what it makes her.

“I’m not saying anything,” Pansy says, simple. Their drinks are gone and she gestures to the barman for two more. “That’s obviously up to you.”

“Right, yeah, of course. I just— kind of thought I was done with all this, by now. The self-doubt and—” she waves a hand, almost hitting someone in the face as they push past to get to the bar, “—finding myself, living my truth bullshit.”

“You’ve been spending way too much time with Lovegood,” Pansy snorts at her phrasing, no malice behind it. (And she can’t _know,_ obviously — Ginny hasn’t told her that Luna is the catalyst for this whole conversation in the first place, but the mention of her still makes Ginny’s face want to do something weird and twitchy.) “You’re _sixteen,_ Weasley. You don’t have to have it all sorted out. We’ve got ages to keep fucking it up.”

It’s a comforting reminder. The war has left Ginny feeling like she’s aged a decade in the space of sixth months, and she forgets, sometimes, that she _is_ still young, still a teenager, allowed to make mistakes and stupid decisions without worrying about the wider impact. She’d felt sort of patronised when Bill had said it but, right now, how much time she still has feels like a gift.

“Cheers to that,” she says, picking up her glass as soon as the barman sets it down again, refilled. Pansy clinks her own against it. Something heavy has vacated the home it’s been making out of Ginny’s shoulders for the past two months.

“You know,” she adds, feeling freer, wanting to talk about it all, suddenly, air everything out. Or, not _suddenly,_ not really — she’s been needing to vent like this all summer, she just didn’t realise she had someone who would listen. Pansy’s no replacement for Tonks, but the hole they left feels a lot smaller when Ginny’s with her. “This is stupid, but I think part of me believed I wasn’t like a— real woman or whatever, unless I liked men.”

“Bullshit,” Pansy claims, the bluntness familiar, soothing. “I’d argue there’s nothing that made me feel _more_ attached to my— womanhood?” — she pulls a face at the term — “than realising what a huge lesbian I am.”

The word comes out so easy, uncensored and uncompromising, that Ginny’s taken aback for a second. She’s deliberately not thought about specific labels, but the way Pansy says it doesn’t sound scary. It sounds proud. It sounds— right.

“Yeah, I said it, grandmother,” Pansy’s saying, animated, her cheeks pinking. “In the unlikely event that your standards have taken a severe nosedive post-death and you’re somehow haunting this shithole of a pub. Hope you’re rolling in your bloody grave, your precious little Pansy likes girls, shove that up your fucking _debutante ball_ _—_ And like, the whole concept of gender and its role in society is fucked, anyway— no offence, obviously, Weasley, I know that’s easy for me to say—” she waves a hand as if she can encompass Ginny’s entire life’s experience with gender identity in one gesture, clearly working up to a rant.

Ginny slumps against the bar and laughs with her, happy to let the warmth of the room and the noise wash over her as Pansy curses out everything from arranged marriage clauses in inheritance documents to the tragic lack of any good gay clubs in the whole of wizarding Britain.

“You know a lot about all this,” Ginny says, when she pauses for breath.

Pansy huffs a laugh through her nose. “I did my research. And my angsting.” She swirls the ice in her drink with her straw. “You should have seen me fifth year. Absolute mess.”

Then, with a head-tilt and a shrewd look at odds with the high colour on her cheeks, she adds more seriously: “It took me a long time to figure all this out, by the way. Don’t feel like you’re the only one.”

Ginny hadn’t really realised she _had_ been feeling like the only one, just a bit, until that moment. Because she did her angsting too, twice over, trying to figure out who she was and what she wanted, and now it’s happening all over again, and it’s not really gotten any simpler. She wonders idly if she’s ever going to stabilise, whether life will just keep throwing mind-changes and self-discoveries at her every time she thinks she’s getting a handle on herself. She knows some people are ok with that, the fluidity, never having to define yourself, but she’s always liked to know where she stands. Pansy makes her feel like that place could be solid ground.

“So you’re like my, what? Wise old— gay guru now?” There, she said the word. The world didn’t end.

Pansy smacks at her arm. “Less of the old, thanks. And fuck, no. This is a one time thing, Weasley, I’ve already surpassed my do-good quota for the year, I’ll break out in hives if I have to keep it up any longer—”

Ginny thumps her right back, and then has to catch her by the wrist when she almost falls sideways off her stool. She’s tiny, Pansy, barely over five foot, and Ginny’s strength has been built up over years of playing Chaser.

“There are easier ways of sweeping a girl off her feet,” Pansy grumbles, righting herself, and there’s a split second, then, where Ginny considers it. The two of them. She already knows that Pansy’s attractive, that she’s fiery and independent and cuttingly funny, that she keeps finding ways to take Ginny out of her comfort zone. But the moment’s just that: over as soon as it’s happened. She likes Pansy a lot, thinks someday she might grow to love her, even, in the way she loves Hermione, or Fleur, but she doesn’t make Ginny feel the same way that Luna does. Which is, as far as Ginny can try and explain it, like someone’s dosed her with Pepper Up Potion every time Luna so much as looks her way, heat sparking in her lungs, under her tongue, making her mouth numb and ears burn.

It’s late when Ginny finally calls it a night and says goodbye to Pansy, who walks with her to the Leaky before she apparates home. She’s probably had too much to drink to be safely apparating, but Ginny knows from extensive experience that there’s literally no use in arguing with her.

Bill and Fleur are sitting up in the living room when she stumbles out of the fireplace and they greet her sleepily.

“Parkinson ok?” Bill asks. Next to him, Fleur stretches with a yawn. They’re on opposite sides of the small sofa, their legs tangled together, and Ginny just stands there for a second, grinning at their socked feet, warmed by the domesticity of it. The simple, obvious affection.

“She’s good.” A pause, as she catches Fleur’s yawn. “Um, listen, I actually wanted to tell you something.” She has no idea what makes her say it, the hum of alcohol in her veins or the realisation that this small room is about as safe and unthreatening a setting as she could hope for, with its low light, the late hour and the quiet, the sound of the sea just audible in the distance.

Or the fact that it’s Bill, who’s always made her feel safest. Maybe because he’s the oldest. Maybe because, though the twins were Ginny’s secret favourites, though Charlie taught her Quidditch and Percy didn’t laugh when she went to him crying in first year, terrified she was going to fail all her classes and Ron, sweet, stupid Ron, cared about her so much he turned into an overprotective idiot last year, Bill’s the one who makes her feel secure. Steady. Fun enough to help her get into trouble, responsible enough to help her out of it again, and with enough years between them that they hadn’t grown up bickering, constantly in each other’s space.

The fact he fell for Fleur probably helped a bit, too. Ginny doesn’t like to think that way, like Bill only accepted her because of Fleur, because she knows it’s not true, that he’d been supportive from the start, but she can’t deny that he has a level of personal insight now that makes her feel understood, moreso than the others sometimes.

So it’s maybe unsurprising that this is who she wants to tell.

They’re both looking at her, patient, curious.

“I’m gay.” She makes herself say it straight (and has to bite down a laugh at the irony of that thought) and it feels— terrifying. Just— out of her mind scary, but also really good. Like in Quidditch when she can tell that taking a certain shot is going to put her in the trajectory to slam into something — the goal posts, the stands, another player — and she does it anyway, because it’s worth it. Even the inevitable smack of pain against her body a second later is worth it. That’s what it feels like now, like with those two words she’s flung the quaffle out of her arms and she knows that even if pain is coming, she can absolutely take it, because it will have been _worth it._

Bill and Fleur, of course, are not a metal pole or a six foot Slytherin beater that her body is about to break itself against. What they are is quiet, rumpled from lack of sleep and a little surprised, maybe, if the look on Bill’s face is anything to go by. What they are is the first people Ginny has told the whole truth about herself to, aside from Pansy. What they are, she thinks, is a soft landing.

“Thank you for telling us.” Fleur’s the first to speak. She smiles at Ginny and Ginny’s reminded that she has some experience with this, with having to tell people something personal and a little frightening about yourself, just because it doesn’t fit in the box they put you in as a baby. (And that had felt so different, when Ginny first asked her parents why they kept calling her a boy, when she wasn’t. Not better or worse, not harder or easier, just different. She’d been so _young._ ) “Really, Gin. It means a lot that you trust us with it.”

Fleur doesn’t usually call her that, and Ginny wants to cry, suddenly, at the way Fleur’s accent softens the _G_ sound and how it feels like the past two years never happened, like they’ve been sisters since the beginning. She feels _weepy,_ and she should probably not have had that last gin and tonic.

“Doesn’t it, Bill?” Fleur prompts her husband and he blinks a couple of times, then grins so wide it lights up his whole face, scars barely visible in the lamplight.

“‘Course,” he says. “Of course, Gin, we’re so— I’m— thanks,” he settles on, looking vaguely annoyed at himself for fumbling over his words. “Thanks for telling us.”

Ginny throws out a hand in an _eh, it’s nothing_ gesture, even though it _is_ something, maybe the biggest and most important something. Bill rolls his eyes at her, laughs, shifts over meaningfully until there’s enough space that Ginny has to flop down in between them or else risk them tackling her on the rug. The emphasis on physical affection in this family used to grate on her when she was younger, teenage and spiky, unwilling to be touched by anyone. Now she wouldn’t have it any other way.

They sit there in comfortable quiet for a bit, Ginny’s head tucked into Bill’s side, Fleur with her toes shoved under Ginny’s thigh for warmth, the sea outside washing in and out, in and out.

“Oh, and I love you,” Bill says after a while, sudden. “Obviously. Should have said that first. And I’m— proud of you? If that’s the right thing to— God, I’m going to have to get better at his, what if our _kids_ are gay and I fuck it— _mess_ it up, I mean— I’m going to have to stop swearing, too, Jesus— but what if I muck it up and they never want to speak to me again and I just win like— worst dad of the year, every year—”

“Kids?!” Ginny says. Bill is a _rambler,_ something Ginny’s always loved about him, because he’s so cool and collected otherwise. With the experience of years, she cuts off his train of thought before it can completely derail itself.

“Oh. Yeah,” Bill says, shrugging. Ginny’s head shifts with the movement. “Not— not right now. But, soon, maybe. We’re figuring it out.”

And there’s a lot to figure out, Ginny’s sure, the mechanics of it, Bill’s potential for passing on the lycanthropy gene, but when Ginny looks over at Fleur she shrugs, too, and confirms easily: “We’re thinking about it.”

“You’d be a great dad, dickhead,” Ginny says, poking Bill in the side. He _would,_ he’s been half-doing it already for most of his life.

Bill makes a mumbled noise, but doesn’t argue. It’s long past midnight. Ginny should really go to bed, can barely keep her eyes open.

“Just don’t drop the baby on its head like you did with Ron,” she says instead, reluctance to move winning out over the desire to be upstairs underneath her duvet.

“William!” Fleur gasps, opening one shocked eye from where her head’s tipped back against the arm of the sofa. “You didn’t.”

“He was fine!” Bill’s quick to defend. “He bounced! I was ten!”

Ginny laughs, half-asleep so that it comes out snuffly, more breath than anything.

“Ok, you're making your Niffler noises, definitely time for bed,” Bill says, nudging at Ginny.

“I do not,” Ginny protests, stopping as her jaw cracks in another huge yawn, “make Niffler noises.” But she gets up, because having his kid sister fall asleep between him and his wife is probably not what Bill wants, even if he’s too nice to say it outright.

“Yeah, you do,” Bill says, covering his own yawn.

Ginny’s not too far gone to flip him off. “‘Night, baby-dropper. ‘Night, Fleur.”

“If it makes you feel any better,” she can hear Fleur saying as she heads up to bed, “I used to pick Gabrielle up by the ears.”

**x.**

Nothing tangible changes after Ginny’s realisation and consequent confession to Bill and Fleur, but she feels different. Lighter, like she had when she cut her hair. This summer seems to be taking a chisel to everything she’s carefully built around herself and chipping away at it until what’s left underneath is real: fledgling and raw, but true.

She comes out to Luna the next morning because she can’t not. They’ve always told each other everything, nothing off-limits, too big or embarrassing or scary. This time, yeah, ok, there’s an element to it that _is_ too much — the small matter of the exact nature of her feelings, and who they centre on — but Ginny cuts herself some slack. One soul-baring conversation at a time and all that.

Luna’s response is textbook. She listens, lets Ginny ramble. She hugs her once Ginny’s talked herself out and then they go down to the beach because George has invented a confusing volleyball-on-brooms game that no-one but Ginny will agree to play with him, and they don’t bring it up again.

It’s a relief, except Ginny spends the next two weeks going out of her mind wondering what Luna’s thinking. As far as she knows, Luna has never expressed interest in _anyone,_ and though the fact that her behaviour around Ginny doesn’t change would suggest that she has no issue with Ginny liking girls, it also doesn’t exactly inspire confidence that she might be open to the idea of being more than friends.

It makes Ginny sort of crazy, full of a new, nervy energy that she can’t dispel no matter how often she jogs up and down the beach. It’s like she’s compensating for Luna’s complete lack of any real reaction by being weird about it herself, fulfilling some arbitrary rule of balance that dictates at least one of them should be acting awkwardly, just to prove that something _happened._ Or maybe the onus of discomfort is falling to her because she isn’t telling the whole truth. Is it fair of her to expect more from Luna, when she hasn’t admitted what she actually wants?

It’s a question that plagues her even as they go on like normal, still sleeping in the same bed, still spending their days together, attempting to eat Bill out of house and home, trying on Fleur’s extensive wardrobe, sunbathing on the beach when it’s too hot to do anything else. And if Ginny’s had to take up running again just to cope with the way her skin is crying out every minute of every day for Luna to _do_ something, then that’s ok. It’s healthy, to be out and moving again. She’d forgotten how good it felt, the air sharp in her lungs, legs pounding.

One afternoon she goes all the way down the coast as far as the land will allow, not stopping as the beach runs out and the ground changes under her feet, until she’s up on the clifftop, jogging round the bends of the coastal path. It’s really beautiful here, something she’s started to take for granted. She’ll be sad to leave, when the time comes.

Luna’s walking along the beach when Ginny turns around to head home again, one hand over her eyes to look into the setting sun. A small, silhouetted figure on the shoreline, the shape of Luna is recognisable to Ginny even from this distance. She runs back, slowing the closer she gets to Luna, lets her pace fall so she can catch her breath, a satisfied ache in her muscles. Luna’s back is to her, Ginny coming up behind, so she throws herself onto her, still a little breathless, laughing.

“Hi,” Luna says, arms automatically looping under Ginny’s legs, the tiny note of surprise in her greeting only noticeable to Ginny, who’s accidentally learned what all the small shifts in the tone of her steady, dreamlike voice mean.

She’s strong, Luna, something people don’t realise about her. Not just brave and clever and unflinchingly genuine, but deceptively athletic. It’s the swimming, probably. She barely even stumbles, adjusting easily to steady their combined weight.

“Hello,” Ginny says, tightens her arms gently around Luna’s neck. She’s sleepy from the run and everything smells salty and clean: the air, the skin of Luna’s bare shoulder under her nose. The sun’s gone golden and it picks out the warmer tones in Luna’s hair, paints the sand pinkish and mellow.

“Good run?” Luna asks, carrying Ginny further up the beach, away from the sea and towards the dry, softer sand before dumping her unceremoniously there and flopping down next to her.

Ginny grunts a yes, tired in the way only the midsummer sun can bring on, muted and drowsy. Her brain tends to switch off when she runs — a solid ninety percent of the reason she does it in the first place — so she can’t really be blamed when she misses what Luna says next.

Luna laughs at her, pokes at her cheek.

“What? Get off.” She opens her eyes and bats Luna’s hand away half-heartedly.

“You get so dopey after you run,” Luna tells her, eyes dancing. “It’s cute.”

Ginny’s not _so_ gone that that doesn’t make her heart kick weirdly. Sometimes she wonders if she’s not the only one collecting data, little observations and behaviours to store up and memorise.

“I’m not cute,” she tells Luna, scrunching up her nose.

Luna pokes at her again, right at the skin bunched up between her eyebrows, but then she doesn’t move, just stays there, leaning half over Ginny with the pad of her finger pressed to the bridge of Ginny’s nose. Luna this close is dizzying at the best of times, but on top of Ginny’s exercise-induced lethargy it’s a lot, the world unfocusing slightly into a pleasant lull.

Which is why she’s caught thoroughly off guard by what Luna says next.

“Would you let me kiss you sometime, do you think?” Luna’s eye contact is like a physical presence when she turns the full force of her gaze on you. Ginny starts, feeling pinned by it, temporarily stuck, important. “Would that be something you’d be ok with?”

“Ok with?” Ginny laughs, can’t help it, completely blindsided by the question. Luna doesn’t even blink, waiting. There’s barely a handspan between their faces. “Are you— is that something _you_ want?”

Luna isn’t one for exasperation, but there’s an eye-roll hidden somewhere in her expression. “Of course,” she says, matter-of-fact. Like it’s a matter of _fact_ that she wants to kiss Ginny, and not merely something Ginny’s been fantasising pathetically about for the last two weeks. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since we were thirteen. Earlier, even, maybe.”

Ginny doesn’t quite splutter, but it’s a near thing. “Thir— and you— what? Just didn’t think to tell me?”

“You loved Harry.”

“Yeah, but—”

“And you’re my best friend, Ginny. I want that, above anything else.”

“Best friends can’t kiss?” It comes out a bit hysterical, Ginny scrambling to comprehend how they got here.

That gives Luna pause for a second. “I suppose they can,” she says, slowly, like she’s really thinking about it. “I don’t _just_ want that, though,” and she looks a little sheepish, now, the closest to flustered that she ever gets, shy and twisting strands of hair around her finger unconsciously.

 _What_ do _you want?_ Ginny wants to ask, but can’t. Can’t make her mouth work, like now that it’s learned kissing Luna is something it might be allowed to do, it’s on strike until Ginny gives it what it wants.

“I’m still sad about dad, you know, and I’m scared about the future, and I know you’ve literally just started figuring yourself out so I didn’t want to push, but—” Luna shrugs. “I thought I’d ask, in case—”

Ginny’s mouth has definitely unionised, decided, independently of her brain, that immediate action is needed, because she’s kissing Luna before the idea has even fully formed. Luna’s caught off guard — she makes this surprised noise, and she almost falls forward right onto Ginny, but she gets with it after a moment. Her hands slide down to cup under Ginny’s neck, clasp around it, fingers interlocked at Ginny’s nape, thumbs on Ginny’s jaw and Ginny feels cracked open, an empty shell on the beach washed clean by the tide, so overwhelmed so quickly that she’s dizzy. Luna’s mouth is soft, eager, a little salty; Ginny’s whole body seems to sigh in recognition like, _oh, right._ Like, _ok, we get it, now._

“That’s a yes, then?” Luna says after a minute or two. She wanted to say it sooner, Ginny could tell, kept trying to pull back to get the words out but Ginny wouldn’t let her, was too busy pushing their mouths together again and again.

“Yeah, yes,” Ginny breathes. She can’t stop _smiling,_ it’s sort of embarrassing and makes it hard to kiss Luna again, which is inconvenient considering that’s what she’d like to be doing for, oh, the rest of time, at least, maybe, if she’s allowed.

“To the kissing?” Luna asks, angling away with a laugh as Ginny goes at her mouth again, so that Ginny’s lips get her chin, off-target but still sweet, “Or to the rest of it?”

“Oh,” Ginny says, making herself focus. Luna’s hands around her neck are very distracting; she feels— cradled. Held. “Both? Yes? All of the above?”

Luna hadn’t actually specified what it is exactly she wants, but Ginny will quite honestly take anything, give anything. She shakes her head a little to clear it.

Luna laughs at her again and the sound breaks against Ginny’s ears like waves. “And I thought you were dopey _before—_ ” she says, and Ginny doesn’t even care that she’s teasing. She’ll happily sacrifice any intellect she has left if Luna’ll keep smiling at her like that.

**xi.**

On the thirty-first, she thinks of Harry. It’s impossible not to. Ginny doesn’t see him, doesn’t know what he’s doing to celebrate his birthday, but it apparently only takes the reminder from the calendar pinned to the kitchen wall for her to realise that the empty, pit feeling in her stomach isn’t just guilt. She _misses_ him, and she feels an idiot for having put this off for so long. She owls him that evening and the next day he’s there, shows up on a fucking huge motorbike of all things.

“What the hell, Harry?” she asks, letting the shock colour her tone but not hiding the amusement either, leaning against the front garden wall, arms crossed, watching him dismount. He doesn’t even have a helmet on, the idiot.

He only shrugs, laughs, and Ginny rolls her eyes at him. And it feels— normal. Not the _same,_ not like they were, but ok, and Ginny wonders what she was so scared of. She shakes her head at him, then jerks it down towards the beach, leading him away from the house with a perfunctory thumbs-up over her shoulder for Bill who she knows will be watching from the kitchen window.

Once they’re sitting in the sand, the atmosphere stiffens a bit. Even though she’s the one who invited him, she doesn't really know what to say. She sort of feels like she made the first move by reaching out and now it’s on him to return it, which might be a bit unfair of her.

Regardless, she’s glad when he just starts talking, tells her about his birthday and how it turns out getting absolutely shitfaced didn’t, to no-one's surprise, improve his _or_ Ron’s baking skills and how Hermione had to go out to the bakery down the road and they all got shouted at by Kreacher for messing up the kitchen. It’d be a pretty funny story under usual circumstances, but there’s something different about him that Ginny can’t help noticing, something that skews the mood a bit. Like someone’s turned the volume down on his personality.

She nods and smiles along in all the right places anyway, and the whole time fights the urge to apologise for not being there. That’s not what she thinks he wants to hear, and if they start on the apologies, they’ll be here all night.

“Eighteen,” he says, when he’s finished, blowing air upwards to move his fringe out of his eyes. He’s definitely let Hermione cut his hair again, it looks awful. “I used to _dream_ about being eighteen when I was living with my aunt and uncle.”

“That’s when Muggles come of age?” Ginny asks.

“Yeah.” He laughs, not a sound entirely devoid of humour, but not an especially happy one, either. “I always thought, if I could just hang on until my eighteenth, then I could— I don’t know. Move out. Get away.”

Ginny wants to hug him, isn’t sure if she should. She still cares, is the thing, still hates the idea of him, tiny and alone in that house, hates the idea that he might still feel like that sometimes. She settles for pressing their shoulders together for a warm, comforting moment, hoping the contact communicates that she gets it. That she’s sorry he ever had to deal with that.

From the smile he gives her, sideways, lopsided, she thinks he understands. “But now I’m here,” he goes on, exhaling noisily. “It’s just like— this is it. _Is_ this it? D’you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Ginny sighs. She doesn’t think any of them will ever stop feeling— lucky? Guilty? For being allowed to get older. The memory of Fred on his birthday back in April, he and George insisting everyone wore hats and played stupid party games from their childhood despite the fact they were turning twenty, despite the _war_ going on, makes Ginny’s nose burn, her eyes prickle. She squeezes them shut tight until the feeling goes away.

“Anyway,” Harry says, huffing a laugh, more natural this time. “God, sorry, I don’t mean to be so depressing.”

Ginny shakes her head at him, smiling back. “If anyone’s earned the right to be depressing, I think it’s you.”

Harry snorts, amusement more evident the stronger it grows, like he’s slowly remembering that this is how they work, how they do things. Laughter, teasing.

“But,” Ginny says, reluctant to steer the conversation down a more serious path but needing to say this before she chickens out, “I didn’t actually want to see you just to ask about your birthday.”

Harry sighs, though his body doesn’t quite tense all the way back to how it was when they’d first sat down. A good sign. “Yeah, I know.”

“So?” Ginny asks, not pushing, but unsure where to start. She doesn’t want to tell him about Luna, not yet, not because she thinks she’s done anything wrong — she and Harry have been broken up for months, so there’s technically no foul play involved — or because she thinks he’ll react badly, but just because it still feels new enough for her to want to protect it. Keep it private just a little longer. And this conversation isn’t about her and Luna, it’s about them.

Harry scrubs a hand over his face. He looks so tired, even months on. Ginny wonders if he’s having as much trouble sleeping as she is. She hopes he has someone like Luna, who can soothe him when he’s sleepless, makes a mental note to bully Ron into checking in on him more often, if he’s not already.

“I know I said,” Harry starts, frowning down at his hands, twisted in his lap, “before I left, that we’d pick back up when things were less complicated. Or—” he pauses, considering. “Not in so many words, I suppose, but that’s what we both thought, right?”

Ginny nods, watching him in profile.

“So— that was the plan. But then I was out there and I wasn’t thinking about anything except surviving long enough to finish it, and. I don’t know.” He shrugs helplessly at her. “I guess I thought that when I got back you’d just kind of be— there, waiting. And I’d have to be the bad guy and try and explain why it didn’t feel the same anymore.”

Ginny clenches her hands in the sand until the grains run in between her fingers, soft, gritty.

“That’s sort of shitty, you know,” she says, only half teasing.

He grimaces at her. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Did you really think I was just pining away like some sad soldier’s wife? You’re not _that_ much of catch, you prick, we dated for like _two months_ —”

Harry barks a shocked laugh, the threat of miserable tension eviscerated in an instant, and cuts her off. “Fuck off, _I_ was pining.”

She quirks an eyebrow at him until he shakes his head, smile twisting into something more relaxed, a happy kind of resignation.

“Fine, whatever. I was a little too busy winning the war to pine, but I thought about you.”

“Oh, you _thought_ about me, be still my beating fucking heart, the great _Harry Potter_ thought about _me_ —”

“Don’t full name me, you arse, I’m not _the great_ anything—”

“You literally just said you were busy winning the war! Pick a complex, Harry, geez—”

And then they’re laughing, salt-spray in the air, sand everywhere, Ginny shoving handfuls of it down the back of Harry’s t-shirt, thumping him hard in the leg when he retaliates by scooping it up and raining it down on her until her scalp is grainy and there’s grit in her mouth.

“I like this, by the way,” he says, ruffling her newly-shorn hair like a dog. “You look too cool to even be friends with me.”

“I’ve always looked like that,” Ginny gets out before he throws more sand at her.

It feels so _easy,_ just like with her brothers, and it hits her that this is really what she’s always wanted from Harry. To be his friend, to spend time with him outside of just being Ron’s little sister. Not to date him or keep him or use him as some kind of weird badge of honour. Just to have him, like this.

“I missed you,” Harry says later, both of them on their backs in the sand, watching the clouds gather as the colour of the sky shifts from blue to purple. “That hasn’t changed.”

“Yeah,” Ginny sighs, knocking their elbows together. “Missed you too, idiot.”

**xii.**

Turns out, Luna is _handsy._ Which isn’t, like, _completely_ unexpected, because they’ve always been physical — touchy-feely, shoving and jumping and climbing, holding hands and linking arms — but Ginny seems to have unlocked some new, deeper level within Luna’s endless inner wells of affection, and it’s addling her higher brain function.

Or maybe it’s just the intent that’s behind every touch now. Maybe Luna’s not doing anything different and it only _feels_ different because of the implications. Different because now her fingers linked with Ginny’s feel like a promise. Her arm slung around Ginny’s shoulders hot and meaningful, her hand pressed into the small of Ginny’s back deliberate.

“Ok,” Ginny pants one night, pulling back. They’ve been curled up here in their room for hours, Bill and Fleur out for dinner at the Burrow, kissing and talking and— mostly kissing, honestly. Ginny’s head is thick with it, her lips swollen. “I need you to, like, maybe— stop touching me, or I’m going to lose my mind.”

Luna doesn’t laugh at her, though she’s mostly joking. Overwhelmed, yes, but not actually serious about Luna stopping. “Oh,” Luna says instead. “Do you not like—”

“No, I do, I definitely do,” Ginny hurries to say. “That’s sort of the problem?”

Luna blinks at her. “It’s a.. problem that I like touching you and you like being touched?” she says slowly.

Ginny makes a frustrated noise, more at herself than anything, and Luna watches her, bemused.

“It’s not a _problem,_ ” Ginny says. “I just— you make me _want_ things and—”

“Like, sex?” Luna asks, simple, casual. 

Ginny feels her whole face flame. Why it’s so overwhelming, when she’s already been-there-done-the-awkward-virgin-thing with Harry, she has no idea. Something about _Luna_ saying it, with her mouth so pink from Ginny’s own..

“Um,” Ginny says, eloquently. “Yeah? I mean—”

“I haven’t, before,” Luna interrupts, leaves it there. _She_ doesn’t seem embarrassed at all, but then it’s dark and Ginny can’t quite get the details of her expression.

Either way, that’s not a surprise, exactly. Ginny suspected as much. She still feels hot all over at the idea, though, that she might— for her to be the first— but then shame follows so quickly after that she has to hide her face in Luna’s shoulder.

“What about you?” Luna prompts gently, letting her burrow there.

“Harry,” Ginny says.

“Hmm.” Luna strokes at her hair. “I guess that makes sense.”

Ginny’s not sure why it felt easier letting Harry see her like this. Part of her is sort of scared of the comparison that Luna’s body might make with her own, the differences, the similarities. How they’ll make her feel, how they’ll make Luna feel. She’s very glad of the low light.

“We don’t have to, you know,” Luna says.

“I know.”

“But you want to?”

Ginny pulls back to look at her, eyes searching her face. “Do _you_ want to?”

“Of course,” Luna says, steady. Her stability is comforting, her way of talking about things straight-forward enough to calm some of Ginny’s anxiety, but it also makes Ginny want to— do something, crack the surface a little. Not that she thinks it’s a facade — that’s just who Luna is, unapologetic — but Ginny wants to break her composure. For her to show that she’s as affected by all of this as Ginny is, for them to both be a little unsteady.

“Yeah,” Ginny admits, answering Luna’s question, then laughs, the weird, butterfly energy in her stomach needing an outlet. It makes Luna laugh, too, and then they’re sniggering like second-years, pressed together under the covers, overwarm and giggly.

Luna kisses her again, presses laughter right into her mouth until Ginny gets distracted, stops smiling long enough that she can kiss back properly. She can’t stop chasing the taste of salt on Luna’s tongue, behind her teeth, and Luna won’t stop touching her hair, hands fisting and unfisting in it, careful and then not-so, making Ginny’s scalp crawl pleasantly.

“Is this better?” Luna breathes when their mouths unstick, and it takes Ginny a long second to realise what she’s asking. She appreciates the unabashed vulnerability, affection swelling in her chest.

“Than with Harry?”

Luna nods, nose against Ginny’s cheek, gaze hidden. She’s clearly a bit embarrassed that she had to ask but it only makes Ginny dizzy with heat, Luna wanting to make this good for her, to be better.

“It’s different,” she says, unwilling to be cruel about her time with Harry but very aware that it never felt like this with him, like her blood is white-hot in her veins, her body lit up with how she feels terrified and cocooned at the same time, shivery and safe and _good._

“Why?” she asks, smiling and then nipping at Luna’s mouth, gentle. “You think there’s some standard you need to live up to?”

“No,” Luna huffs. “It’d be nice if we were on even footing, is all.”

Ginny dissolves into laughter again, thinking of how she’d just been wishing for the same thing.

“What?” Luna asks, trying to pout through a smile. “Don’t laugh at me.”

“Sorry,” Ginny says, tucking long strands of hair back away from Luna’s face, still grinning. “I just— I was thinking the same. I know I’ve— whatever, with Harry, but I really don’t know what I’m doing here, either, Lu. You make me go all— newborn thestral.”

Luna snorts at the comparison, but it’s true, Ginny does feel shaky, inexperienced, like she’s learning to walk for the first time. It’s not a _bad_ feeling.

“We’re just— figuring it out, together, right?” she adds, watches Luna’s eyes go molten, feels her body relax further underneath Ginny.

“Yeah,” she says. “‘Course.”

Ginny has to kiss her again then, tilting her head to get the angle right. Luna lets out a soft, breathy noise that makes Ginny’s insides clench and she presses even closer, letting her weight flatten them together from hip to shoulder, their legs tangled.

“So what do you want?” Luna asks when Ginny lets her go again. “Or, no, wait, too much?” She hums at whatever Ginny’s face is doing — her expression must be broadcasting just how far she is from even knowing where to _begin_ with that. “You like it when I touch you.”

It’s not a question. Ginny nods anyway, neck hot.

“And you like kissing. And you’ve been with Harry.” She reels them off like a checklist, like she wants to make sure she’s got all the information before she goes any further. Ginny melts in spite of herself, at Luna’s genuine consideration of her and her feelings. “And you’ve— have you touched yourself? Before Harry?”

Ginny _squeaks_. Luna saying these things is— almost _too_ much. In a good way, though, maybe. “I have,” she hides her face in her hands, awkward, but not enough to want to stop. “Not recently, though, ‘cause— y’know.” Being forced into a war and then having to deal with the aftermath of your brother dying would put a damper on any teenage libido.

Luna nods like she gets it. “Ok. Do you want to talk about it?”

“Oh my God,” Ginny groans. She _does,_ sort of, but it’s also mortifying. Her relationship with her body has always been a little strained, never one to linger too long in the shower or be completely comfortable enough to let herself explore it fully. Even with Harry, they hadn’t actually done much past some over-the-clothes stuff and (God, she cringes even thinking the word, feeling thirteen again and juvenile) _dry-humping._ He hadn’t touched her, not in the way Luna’s suggesting. She’d touched _him,_ and that had been ok, she’d been fine, enjoyed it, even, making him feel good. But mostly she’s avoided having to think too hard about the reality of her body in its entirety.

“I can go first, if that’s easier,” Luna says, concern drawing her eyebrows down at Ginny’s prolonged silence.

Ginny nods, then immediately reconsiders and sidesteps into a vehement headshake instead. She doesn’t think Luna talking about touching _her_ self is going to do anything for Ginny’s clarity of mind.

“I—,” she starts, talking to the bridge of Luna’s nose so she doesn’t get distracted by those wide eyes, the blown pupils. “I have, but. I don’t know. It’s hard, sometimes. Because of—. What I’m working with.” She waves a vague hand in the direction of her lower half, aware she’s talking in weird, sharp fragments, but unable to stop. This is vulnerable to a near unbearable degree. She’s never opened up like this; she and Harry had sort of just— gotten right to it.

But Luna’s never given her a single reason to be afraid of rejection before, so she pushes on.

“I don’t— it’s not something I’m _ashamed_ of,” she hastens to clarify. “If I wanted to change it, I would have done something about it.” She ducks her chin down at her chest, evidence of changes she _had_ been comfortable making. “And maybe I will, one day, but— I dunno. For now, like— it’s still me. It’s my body.”

“Right,” Luna beams at her, encouraging.

“Doesn’t mean I always want to, uh— get all up in there, y’know?” she adds, scrunching her face.

Luna’s hands smooth over her shoulders. “Yes, absolutely.” There’s a heavy pause where Ginny’s very aware of how hot her ears are. Then Luna goes on, careful. “So, what did you—?”

“Wow, ok, I hear you,” Ginny sighs, falling into the joke with relief, ready for the conversation to swing back in the direction of their usual, easy back-and-forth again. “Skip to the sexy bit, right.”

Luna laughs, shoves at her a bit. “You know that’s not what I meant.”

“No, no, I get it, you just want me to talk _dirty._ ” She’s teasing, playing it up, and the feeling of it fills her up like soup, warm with the release of talking about this openly, with someone she trusts. She hadn’t thought it could be like this, _fun_ and silly, intense but not too serious. Just like how they always are together, always have been, only with this added dynamic over the top, hot and surprising in how right it feels.

She feels emboldened by Luna’s face, helplessly amused, and she powers on determinedly, pushing through the embarrassment. “Mostly I just used to like— with a pillow.” She makes an incriminatingly vague gesture and then has to hide her face in her hands again.

Luna, as usual, knows exactly how to put her at ease. “Oh,” she says, excited. “I’ve done that.”

Ginny peeks out from between her fingers. “You have?”

“Mm-hmm. Feels nice.”

Ginny laughs at how surreal the conversation feels. How easy it is, in spite of that. “Yeah.” It’s impossible not to imagine Luna, then, hips moving, eyes screwed up in pleasure. If Ginny’s face gets any hotter she’s going to pop a blood vessel. She coughs once. “It, uh— it does.”

“Well, maybe we could do that together,” says Luna, like they’re planning a day-trip, and not a session of mutual masturbation.

Ginny’s giggling again, overcome, giddy with it. “Sure, Lu,” she says. “We can do that.”

Luna smiles, grips her chin so she can pull her down for another kiss, closed-mouthed and sweet. “Not right now, though.”

“Not right now,” Ginny agrees, relieved that Luna’s picked up on how she’s reaching her limit on emotionally intimate conversations for the day. She still feels good, can sense the want sitting low in her belly, but it’s a lazy kind of desire and it’s getting late, besides. Ginny knows her blinks will soon start to lengthen and stick, her eyelids get heavier. They can talk more tomorrow. _Do_ more tomorrow, if that’s what Luna wants.

“Hey, thanks,” Luna whispers once they’ve rearranged themselves, Ginny’s head on her chest so they can actually sleep comfortably.

Ginny’s already halfway gone, muddled and hazy, but she opens an eye. “What for?”

Luna shrugs against the pillow. “Trusting me,” she says.

“Of course,” Ginny mumbles, and lets sleep tug her under.

**xiii.**

“You sure about this?” Ginny asks, just once more, to check. They’re in Devon for the day, ostensibly at the request of mum, who’s trying to re-establish Sunday lunches as they used to be pre-war — overcrowded, overcatered and absolutely, no-questions-asked, _I don’t want to hear it_ compulsory — but really to sneak away after pudding, when everyone’s too full and distracted to notice, and visit what’s left of Luna’s house.

No one’s been anywhere near it since Xenophilius was pulled from the rubble and sent to Azkaban, the Death Eaters too preoccupied with chasing Harry to worry about him past that. They’re at the bottom of the hill now, she and Luna, a hill Ginny’s climbed a hundred times over, one she’s spent sunny afternoons rolling down, shrieking with laughter, sick-dizzy and grass-stained.

Luna’s expression is hard to decipher, but she nods after only a tiny pause, and they set off.

It was not Ginny’s idea to come here. She’d never have suggested it, never brings it up, as a rule, the wreckage of Luna’s childhood that’s been sitting here all summer, content in the knowledge that Luna would decide one way or another eventually, and hoping only that she’d let Ginny be there to hold her hand when she did. Which, she is — Ginny’s palm is starting to get damp already and it’s actually harder to scale the grassy slope with their hands linked like this, but she’s not about to let go — and Ginny appreciates that a lot, being included, even though Luna had looked at her askance when she asked if she could come along and said, in a very un-Luna like tone, “Um, _obviously._ ” Ginny had laughed so hard she’d made a gross little snorting noise that even Luna’d had to admit was less than cute.

The hill is steep but small — part of what had made it so fun to throw themselves down when they were younger — so it’s not long before they’re cresting the top of it and the house comes into view. Or, where the house _should_ be. The sky, cornflower blue and cloudless, looks too big, somehow, the gap where the odd, cylindrical building used to stand an almost visible negative space, the memory of it still there when Ginny blinks, like the imprint of a too-bright light.

Luna’s grip in hers tightens. Ginny feels that gap in her chest. She’d loved this house — not like Luna had, obviously, but it had practically been her second home before Hogwarts. Everyone else always thought it a weird place to raise a kid, even dad, which Ginny honestly thought was a bit rich coming from _them,_ who lived in a house akin to a rabbit-warren in both name and nature, but she’d loved it fiercely. It was Luna, to her, inasmuch as any place or thing could hope to be.

“Plums seem to be doing ok,” she comments, determined to find something positive for them to focus on.

Luna smiles at her, grateful, takes a fortifying breath and then leads the way to the front steps, which are still intact, though the yolk-yellow door they used to climb up to is now gone, its frame empty and cracked. She strokes a hand over a Dirigible plum branch as they pass, presses her fingers to the bark in greeting.

It’s harder than Ginny thought it would be to see the mess up close. Each floor has caved in on itself, the outer walls the only sections still standing in parts, stone and brick exposed everywhere, the rest a clutter of debris. The spiral staircase that used to run up the centre of the house — _God,_ they used to slide down its bannister, corkscrewing round and round — is on its side, half-buried, the metal bent and discoloured. Bits of printing press and picture frames, books and pillows and crockery, all thrown together in the explosion.

“Right,” Luna says, a little suffocated, a little lost. “Right. Ok.”

It sounds like she means to do something, start somewhere, but her face is telling Ginny she has no idea where to begin, so Ginny decides then and there to put her own feelings about losing this place — this sanctuary, an escape from her own overcrowded house when she needed it, this site of sleepovers and tea-parties — aside and be what Luna needs her to be.

“I think we should start by clearing,” she suggests and Luna turns that grateful smile on her again.

They shift the worst of the heavier stuff with levitation charms. Technically, Ginny’s still not supposed to be doing magic outside of school for another week or so, but Luna’s of age, and besides, Ginny really hopes the Ministry has more important things to be concerned about right now than some almost-seventeen year old helping her best friend — girlfriend? _Really_ not the time for that conversation — un-annihilate her childhood.

It’s hard work, even when they break down the larger pieces before lifting them, and it only occurs to Ginny once they have a substantial pile of discarded detritus that they could just be vanishing anything that’s unwanted or unsalvageable, but by then it seems right, sifting and sorting through it like this. With the bigger, bricks-and-mortar stuff out of the way, it’s easier to see what's left. To spot things that are less damaged — dusty and a little dented, maybe, like they’ve been knocked around a bit, but not beyond rescue. Ginny has to swallow down an awful, pained noise when she finds a fragment of ceiling painted with what’s unmistakably a section of her own face, part of her nose and one cheek. She remembers coming over after Luna had finished that mural and being full of some glowing, unidentifiable emotion at the proof, there, on the ceiling, that Luna was ok, that she was happy and had people who cared about her, more than just Ginny in her corner now.

The piles quickly grow and multiply. Luna’s got some kind of categorising system that Ginny can’t follow, so she mostly just cleans, vanishes the dust off of things and moves them into the space they’ve cleared in the centre so that Luna can decide what to do with them. The big, important things that Luna inherited — money, some family heirlooms — weren’t kept in the house, so those at least escaped unscathed, though they’re not anywhere as sensible as Gringotts. Xenophillius didn’t believe in banks; Ginny’s pretty sure his life savings are still buried under the rose bush out the back, waiting for Luna to go dig them up.

All in all, they’re only at it for about an hour before Luna slumps, the tired line of her body declaring, without her having to actually say anything, that she’s done for the day. Ginny’s quick to be the one to suggest they finish up another time, to take that burden of admitting defeat away from her and Luna nods, presses the back of one hand to her forehead, stares down at what they’ve done.

Then she starts crying, just a bit.

Luna doesn’t cry often, and the sight of her face, crumpled and sad, big eyes swimming, sets Ginny off, too, but she thinks it’s good, probably, for Luna to let it out, for both of them to, though Ginny’s still conscious that her own loss here is minimal compared to how Luna must be feeling. They walk out around the side of the house, sit there on the top of the hill like they’ve done too many times to list and watch the sun crawl slowly across the sky until the tears run out. They’ll have to get back soon, placate mum, shrink all the stuff Luna wants to keep and cart it back through the Floo to Shell Cottage, but for now it’s enough just to sit, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee, and let themselves mourn for a bit.

**xiv.**

Ginny comes of age on a cloudy Tuesday in August. For a string of years as a kid she’d shared with Percy, their birthdays so close it made sense to combine the celebrations, until Ginny got old enough to understand what was actually going on and everyone quickly realised Percy’s idea of a militantly organised trip out to whatever museum or site of historical interest he’d chosen wasn’t exactly compatible with Ginny’s wish to lie around at home, doing as little as possible and eating as much cake as she could get away with. Since then, they’ve kept things separate, an arrangement rendered all the more necessary by Percy’s period of estrangement from the family (mum’s words, not Ginny’s, who cheerfully refers to it as The Great Percy Weasley Twattishness of 1995-98, loudly and pointedly whenever Percy’s in earshot. Percy, to his credit, takes it pretty well. He even wears the badge George made him).

Her last few birthdays have been weird, with the looming war, the wedding last year and Harry’s seventeenth so soon before her sixteenth, so she’s not sure how she feels when she rolls over on the morning of the eleventh and opens her eyes for the first time as, by societal definition, an adult. Tired, mostly. Hungry. A little disappointed by the grey sky outside, a little too pleased that Luna’s is the first face she gets to see, half-buried in the pillow and still slack with sleep.

Luna’s not a morning person, to Ginny’s endless amusement. She’s so steady and calm most of the time, eternally unruffled, that it feels like a privilege, like being in on a secret, to watch her when she’s waking up, grumbling at Ginny to stop moving around, burrowing further into the blankets. She was always late to breakfast back at school, wandering in ten minutes before the bell for first lesson and eating toast with a kind of dazed, wide-eyed sleepiness, only really focusing on her surroundings if Ginny managed to get her attention from two tables away.

Ginny watches her now in the pale light, catalogues the scrunch of her nose, how the hairs of one eyebrow have been pushed against the grain by the way she sleeps with her face shoved into the pillow. She thinks she’s getting away with it, the open staring, until Luna pushes at her blindly with one hand and tells her to stop.

“I can’t sleep with you looking at me like that,” she murmurs, voice low and slurred. Ginny wants to ask _like what,_ isn’t sure what her face is doing, or how Luna even knows when her own eyes are still closed. “Even if it is your birthday.”

“Yeah,” Ginny says, rolling closer so that they’re sharing a pillow (they already were, it’s a tiny single bed, but like this their noses almost touch). “It _is_ my birthday. That means you have to do what I want, and get out of bed before noon.”

“Not how it works,” Luna sighs, but she opens her eyes, rubs at them with the heel of one hand. “Happy birthday,” she smiles, and kisses the tip of Ginny’s nose. Ginny’s stomach aches at the sweetness of it.

She lets Luna lie there a little longer, like it’s _her_ birthday, but it’s selfish, too, because it means Ginny gets to pay her back, kiss her awake with a hundred tiny, closed-lip presses of her mouth on Luna’s sleep-warm shoulders, the skin where the collar of her oversized t-shirt sits, the fingertips of the hand that isn’t tucked under the pillow.

“Fine, fine,” Luna says, when Ginny kisses at her ear, blows into the shell of it. “I’m getting up.”

Bill is making pancakes when they get downstairs, and Fleur’s filled the kitchen with so many balloons that it’s almost impossible to navigate the small room. They keep popping and exploding confetti everywhere any time they get too close to the heat of the still-sizzling frying pan, so that by the time they sit down to eat, everything’s coated in a layer of glitter and gold flakes.

“It was a lovely _idea,_ ” Luna says, picking confetti out of her pumpkin juice. Ginny avoids Bill’s eye, hides her smile in her own juice as Fleur blinks like she’s not sure how to respond to that. Luna’s perfected the art of the back-handed compliment without ever realising she’s doing it.

No one else is coming over until this afternoon so they take their time with breakfast, brewing pot after pot of tea and eating an ungodly amount of pancakes. Luna drizzles syrup over Ginny’s plate in the shape of a wonky seventeen and Ginny can feel herself smiling stupidly big but doesn’t care, couldn’t make herself less obvious if she tried. Besides, if Bill and Fleur didn’t already suspect, the way she and Luna go upstairs together after breakfast to run a bath is pretty in-your-face, as hints go.

It feels silly and indulgent, taking a bath in the middle of the day, doubly so because Ginny convinces Luna in with her. She still makes her turn around whilst she strips off and gets in, doesn’t let her look until she’s under the water, hidden by bubbles, but. Small steps. _Luna_ has no issue pulling her clothes off without a second thought and climbing in next to her.

“What you said about your body,” she says slowly once they’ve rearranged a bit, their toes bumping under the water, both sitting with their arms wrapped around their knees like kids and their faces close. “You know I don’t feel the same, right?”

Ginny thinks back to that conversation in the sheltered space of their shared bed and frowns in question. The words _don’t feel the same_ strung together in that order are sort of panic-inducing, even if she doesn’t think that’s what Luna’s getting at. “About your body?”

“About yours,” Luna clarifies.

“What about mine?”

Luna huffs a laugh that makes the wobbly wall of foam between them shake and break into tiny bubbles. “You said you haven’t always loved the idea of touching it. I just wanted to make sure you knew that the same doesn’t apply to how _I_ feel about touching you.”

“Yeah, I,” Ginny starts, cheeks heating from more than just the warm water. “I sort of.. got that, Lu. From what you said.”

It’s weird, should feel worse, scarier, the idea of someone else knowing her in that way, _seeing_ her like that, but it doesn’t. For some reason she trusts Luna with her body more than she trusts herself. Luna looks at it— her, _Ginny_ — like it’s something worth wanting, like she’ll be kinder to it than Ginny has ever been.

Luna smiles, sits up a bit to kiss her and giggles when she slips, misses, butts their heads together accidentally. “Good,” she says, rubbing at the collision spot on Ginny’s forehead with a quickly-pruning thumb. “Just checking.”

“Thanks,” Ginny says, grins like a sap, then dumps cupped hands full of bubbles on Luna’s head because she’s working on the sincerity and the mature communication and everything, she is, but Luna’s still first and foremost the person who makes her feel eleven again, gap-toothed and too happy to do anything but let that joy spill out all over Luna’s beaming face.

**xv.**

The event they make out of Ginny’s birthday — everyone round for dinner in the evening, fireworks that George brings over and sets off on the beach once the sun’s gone down — reminds her that they never got to celebrate Luna’s back in February, and she tells Luna as much the next day, unable to sit with the comparison, the fact that Luna spent her seventeenth in the cellar at Malfoy Manor instead of surrounded by friends a concept so depressing it makes Ginny’s heart hurt like she has indigestion.

Luna waves a hand, nonchalant, when she asks. “It was ok. Me and Mr. Ollivander sang some songs.” She frowns, corrects herself. “Well, _I_ sang some songs, he wasn’t really in any state to be singing.”

Ginny just looks at her, a horrible mixture of affection and indignation on Luna’s behalf tangling for attention in her throat.

“I guess it wasn’t the best,” Luna admits when Ginny still hasn’t said anything, which only cements in Ginny the idea that they have to do something now, however delayed.

“Tomorrow’s your half-birthday, anyway,” she tells Luna. The thirteenth will mark six months to the day since she turned seventeen, so it seems appropriate. “And I’m pretty sure the queen has two birthdays.”

“Oh, well, if the _queen_ does,” Luna says, teasing, but she agrees easily enough, lets Ginny promise to bring her breakfast in bed and says she’ll have a think about what she wants to do.

Breakfast inevitably turns into brunch-in-bed, because Luna’s idea of a good day is one that doesn’t really start before midday, but that works out well for Ginny, who gets up while Luna’s still asleep and pads down to the kitchen to make french toast, piling the slices with berries and dusting them with icing sugar. She puts a warming charm on the tray once she’s back upstairs, sets it down on top of the chest-of-drawers to wait until Luna’s less dead to the world and climbs right back into bed with her, throwing a leg over her hip, snakes both arms around her waist.

The warming charm proves necessary since, even once Luna stirs awake, they get a bit distracted and the food quickly falls down Ginny’s list of priorities, kicked unceremoniously off its top spot by the need to make Luna go all pink and find new places on her body that get her to squirm closer, breath heavy in Ginny’s ears, on her tongue.

Once they’ve eaten, cross-legged on the bed, definitely getting crumbs everywhere, and Ginny’s kissed the sticky-sweet out of Luna’s mouth just once more, for luck, Luna wants, unsurprisingly, to go swimming. They take their time changing out of their sleep clothes, clearing the dishes and walking down to the beach, letting their food digest a little before they get into the water, because Luna insists they’ll cramp, though Ginny’s unconvinced that rule, told to them when they were small and tireless, impatient to be up and off, actually has any basis in truth. Ron used to say the Grindylows could smell the food in your belly and if you didn’t wait long enough they’d come and snatch you, just to freak Ginny out, but she’s even _less_ convinced of that, especially after she got to school and learned _Grindylows only live in freshwater, Ron, you cretin, why’d you spend all those years trying to convince me I’d get eaten?_

It’s been a while since she’s been in the water, brotherly scare tactics aside. She _can_ swim — Dad taught her here, in fact, over several summers, first at the little indoor pool in the Muggle leisure centre down the road that she thinks has since closed down, and then out in the sea itself, struggling to keep up with Ron and Fred and George, wearing arm-bands and a bubble-head charm that mum insisted on until she got more confident — but she doesn’t, often, and the waves today are not gentle. She clings onto Luna once they’re out from the beach a fair distance, their skin slipping under the water, blinks salt out of her eyes and laughs as Luna piggybacks her, tries to dunk her, splashes away grinning. She’s sure Luna usually swims _properly,_ front-crawling up and down the shoreline, but today she’s happy to cart Ginny around, giggling.

“God, is it ever warm?” Ginny asks, letting a violent shiver run through her. Luna has her in her arms, Ginny’s legs wrapped around her waist under the waves, so she must feel it.

“It’s the Atlantic,” Luna says, laughing. Her hair’s plastered to her head and stained a darker blonde from the water. She looks half-drowned, droplets collecting on her eyelashes, and so happy that Ginny’s surprised they’re not simply floating, so buoyant she feels at being the one who gets to see Luna like this, to be the reason, in whatever small way she can, for Luna’s smile. The sun is mostly hidden behind thick, pewter-coloured clouds, but it breaks through just then and flashes off the surface of the water, turning it a bright, steely grey for a moment.

“C’mon,” Luna says, squeezing at the back of Ginny’s knees to get her to drop her legs, “Race you to that buoy over there.”

She wins, obviously, and then she wins again, and again, and then she fakes a foot cramp and lets Ginny win one, and then goes back to swimming circles around Ginny when Ginny realises what she’s done and shouts indignantly over at her that she doesn’t need the pity, thanks, and how if they were on brooms this would be a completely different story, and it’s not her fault that her girlfriend is part-merperson or something.

It gets Luna to swim back over to her, fast, when she says that, and she doesn’t actually realise she’s just called Luna her girlfriend for the first time until she’s right in front of her and kisses Ginny enthusiastically enough that they get taken off guard by the building wave and end up soaked, gasping, sucking salt out of each other’s mouths.

By then the clouds have darkened further and fat drops of rain are starting to hit the water, the sun officially decided to take the rest of the day off and go home early, so Ginny makes the executive decision to get them both the hell back to dry land whilst it can still be called such. Her body’s adjusted enough to the temperature of the water that she doesn’t want to get out, knowing how cold the air will feel on her wet skin, but it’d be stupid to stay out much longer if the weather’s only going to worsen, so she grabs Luna’s hand and they stumble back to the shore, half-swimming half-running in that weird, slow-motion way you have to move through water.

“Merlin’s fucking balls, Luna,” she shouts over the wind once they’re on the beach, shivering.

Luna’s teeth have started chattering but she still grins. “Yeah,” she admits. “This is the worst part.”

Instead of following Ginny’s instinct, which is to grab their towels and run as fast as she can back to the warmth of the cottage, Luna wraps Ginny up in a hug, rubbing her hands up and down Ginny’s goosebumped arms. It doesn’t actually do much to warm either of them, but Ginny appreciates the sentiment.

“I know it’s your fake birthday,” Ginny says, squeezing tight around Luna’s middle, trying to leech warmth, trying to share it. “But if we stay out here much longer my lips are going to be too numb to do anything.”

She waggles her eyebrows suggestively and Luna laughs, shuddery with cold. “You big baby,” she teases, but then she twists and hoists Ginny up onto her back, so Ginny can’t complain. She stoops to grab the towels as she heads up the beach, Ginny still clinging to her like an awkwardly shaped backpack (and Ginny is really never going to get over how easily Luna can just carry her around, Jesus), and hands them back over her shoulder so that Ginny can drape them over them both. They walk back home like that, an odd, towel-covered turtle-shaped lump on two legs.

“It so much as drizzles, and you won’t let me fly,” Ginny says into Luna’s ear, her arms looped around her neck, “but this is apparently fine weather to go swimming in.”

As if in punctuation, thunder sounds in the sky above and the rain picks up a little more, coming down harder. Luna only smiles. “I’m not there when you’re flying, to make sure you’re ok,” she says. Ginny has no response to that, or any idea why the very concept of Luna taking care of her makes her warm despite the drop in core temperature, so she just tightens her grip, sits up straighter so that she’s supporting more of her own weight, and hides a smile in Luna’s hair.

They get back to an empty house, Bill and Fleur still out at work, so they grab more towels from the upstairs cupboard, get a fire going in the living room and sit there, bundled up, drip-drying onto the rug. Ginny feels her body thaw as they warm up by degrees, drinking tea and eating biscuits summoned from the kitchen, too lazy to get up and fetch them by hand.

“A log-fire, in August?” Bill asks when he gets home, raising an eyebrow at the two of them, stretched out on their nest of towels, still in the suits they went swimming in. Ginny just laughs at him, not caring that it seems wrong, a scene more suited to winter, with the open fire and the cosy warmth of the room. If the weather outside was behaving more like summer, so would they.

She gets a little lost then, thinking about the coming months. About spending them with Luna. Holding Luna’s cold hand in hers, walks through frosty grass, the insane amount of knitwear Luna owns and will inevitably force onto Ginny to keep her warm.

Later, after Bill’s cooked dinner, after they’ve showered and finally changed and played too many rounds of Exploding Poker — Charlie taught them after he picked it up in Romania; Fleur always, without fail, slaughters anyone she plays with — Ginny stands at the sink rinsing mugs. Luna comes up behind her, hooks her chin over one shoulder.

“Good day?” Ginny asks.

Luna nods, her chin digging into Ginny’s trapezius for a second. She waits until Ginny’s turned the tap off, then slides her hands down Ginny’s arms, tugs at her wrist.

“Dance with me,” she says, already humming along to a tune only she can hear, pulling them backwards to bump into the table.

Ginny snorts. “I can’t dance.”

Luna ignores her, takes one of her still-damp hands and puts the other on her waist. “You danced fine with Neville at the Yule Ball.”

“Yeah, but that’s _Nev._ He was very obviously doing all the work.”

“I’ll lead, then,” Luna says, and Ginny lets her spin them around the tiny kitchen.

**xvi.**

They both get letters towards the end of the month. The looming advent of September has been playing on Ginny’s mind, the late weeks of dying summer strange without the usual frenzy of school-shopping and packing, so she’s not all that surprised when Bill spots the owls from where he’s leaning against the kitchen counter, eating toast with one hand and holding up the Prophet with the other to skim the headlines.

“Bit early isn’t it?” he asks, shoving the window open further so the owls can fly through.

Ginny just shrugs, moves her plate out of the way just in time. They’re definitely Hogwarts owls, the parchment envelopes thick and sealed with the familiar wax crest.

“It’s like she _knows,_ ” she complains to Luna when she’s finished reading the top letter, throwing it down with more force than she means to in her frustration.

“Knows what?” Bill asks without looking up, preoccupied once again with the paper.

Ginny sighs, bracing herself. “That we were thinking of not going back.” She hasn’t discussed it with anyone other than Luna, too worried about her mum’s reaction should it get back to her, which, it definitely would, no one in this family can keep their mouth shut.

“Really?” That gets Bill to look over, face tight with surprise. “But— why? What else would you do?”

“I’ve no idea,” Ginny tells him, honestly. “We just talked about it, is all.”

She really doesn’t know what she’ll do if not finish school, but the tone of McGonagall’s letter was a little too pointed for her liking. She resents being presented with a book list and a reminder about the delayed reopening like it’s the only option. It’s not like she’s ever claimed to do _well_ with being told what to do.

“I suppose they’re trying to make everything seem as normal as possible,” says Luna, eyes scanning her own letter whilst she picks a croissant into flaky little bits with her hands.

“It’s _not_ normal though, is it?” Ginny points out, a little heated. “Are they expecting us to just— what, go back to the place most of us spent last year watching get torn apart by psychos and do homework like nothing happened?”

Luna tilts her head like, _fair point,_ but Bill cuts in with a frown. “You have to go back, though, Gin. You haven’t passed your exams.”

Ginny bristles. “Actually, Bill, I don’t _have_ to do anything.” She probably _will_ end up going back, so arguing about it is pointless, but it’s the principle of the thing. “Fred and George never finished their NEWTs and they’re fine.”

Well, George is. Financially speaking, anyway, which is what’s relevant here.

“They had a successful business ready to go,” Bill says, waving that argument away with a dismissive hand. “And a thousand galleons of investment from Harry.”

“Maybe I have a business idea,” Ginny says, petulant.

“Do you?”

Ginny scowls. “No, but I _could—_ ”

“And are you expecting a cash sum from Harry, too?”

“ _No,_ Bill, obviously not, but—”

“School is not everything,” Fleur interrupts from where she’s been sitting sipping coffee without comment, watching this play out.

“Easy for you to say,” Bill scoffs, “as someone who graduated top of her class.”

Fleur only shrugs, the movement liquid on her slim shoulders. “And where did that get me? Married at twenty to an _Englishman_ and working part-time at a bank.”

It’s a joke, one typical of her, subtle and acerbic (and, yeah, it took Ginny a while to figure that out, her brand of humour, to learn to stop taking her dry comments as insults and acknowledge them for the well-intentioned teasing they were) and it’s just on the right side of cutting, enough to shock both Ginny and Bill into laughter and stop the argument before either of them gets too into it.

“Oi,” Bill says, grinning toothy and sharp. “Watch who you’re calling _Eengleeshman._ ”

Fleur laughs and tells him to go back to his paper, and Ginny accepts the half a pastry Luna pushes at her, the conversation about school, for now, at least, dropped.

**xvii.**

Luna’s learning to drive. Bill is teaching her guitar and Fleur is teaching her how to weave baskets from the seagrass that grows under the window and she has a book that’s apparently teaching her Mermish. For all she says she doesn’t really want to go back to school, the innate, insatiable Ravenclaw desire for knowledge is still there. It’s important, she tells Ginny, to keep learning things. It helps to create, do something with your hands, when your head is muddy. She’s thinking of writing an essay, she says, on the link between practical skills and Wrackspurt development. Ginny thinks if she has to watch Luna’s hands get any more capable her brain’ll start melting out of her ears, Wrackspurts or not.

The driving bemuses Ginny. Luna doesn’t like flying — the only way Ginny can convince her onto a broom is by having her sit backwards, their bodies pressed together chest-to-chest and Luna’s arms around her middle, her face buried in Ginny’s neck, a position Ginny is more than happy to accommodate — and she hasn’t got her apparition licence either. It makes sense that she wants to be able to get around independently, but Ginny still thinks it an odd choice. Everything about Luna screams magic, and cars are so Muggle, with their metal and glass and machinery that Ginny doesn’t understand.

She has an instructor in the village, a white-haired man Ginny’s met all of one time, and she’s not really supposed to go out without him until she passes her test, but they do it anyway. Both of them, Luna behind the wheel, Ginny curled in the passenger seat, winding through the tight, Cornish roads with no purpose or direction. Ginny has to admit there’s some appeal to it: the hum of the engine under her, the way it feels like there’s no one else left on the planet when it’s just the two of them in this weird, moving box. They rarely pass any other cars (Luna waves frantically at the other drivers every time it does happen, beaming), whether because this part of the country is quiet, traffic-wise, or because they tend to go out at odd hours. Mornings when the sun’s up but hasn’t warmed the world yet, or late into nights where neither of them can sleep, the headlights an unfamiliar, artificial beam that illuminates the countryside in small bursts.

“Don’t you think it’s weird,” Luna asks on one such night. “That if we keep going, the land just sort of— ends.”

Ginny’s wrapped up in a hoodie over her sleep shorts, an old one of Charlie’s, but the car is warming up the further they drive through the indigo blue of the small hours.

She considers. She’s never thought about it. “I guess.”

“Like— it all used to be connected,” says Luna. “The land, I mean. It’s a Muggle idea, but it’s accepted by most Magical Historians. That it was all one big chunk until pieces started breaking away.”

“Pandora?” Ginny tries, something half-forgotten niggling at the very back of her mind.

Luna smiles. Ginny watches it, in profile, the moonlight so, so beautiful on her face. “Pangea,” she corrects. “Pandora was the box.”

“Right,” Ginny says, then huffs. “That witch who got blamed for every bad thing that ever happened because she decided to lift one lid, like— one time.”

Luna’s smile turns conspiratorial, a moment of commiseration for their shared history, all the ways they’ve had to work that bit harder to prove themselves than wizards do.

“Curiosity killed the cat, the Muggles say,” she says, with a little shrug. She clicks on the lever that Ginny knows makes a little yellow light flash on the car, alerting other drivers to where she’s going, even though the road is completely deserted. Pandora was her mother’s name, too. Ginny remembers that, but isn’t sure she should mention it. Her body rocks gently with the momentum of the turn as they swing round a corner onto an equally empty stretch of road. 

“Which is silly, really,” Luna goes on. “We’d never go anywhere or do anything if we weren’t curious.”

“Do you want to?” Ginny asks, fuzzy with being awake for too long. Time stretches weirdly in the little bubble of the front seat.

“Want to what?”

“Go somewhere. Do something.”

“Right now?”

Ginny hums a yes. Luna laughs, pleased at the suggestion or endeared by Ginny’s sleepy attempts at holding the thread of the conversation. “Where?” she asks.

“I don’t know.” Ginny watches her hands on the wheel, the gear-stick. Small but strong, deft. “You were talking about where the land just stops.”

Luna looks at her, eyes off the road for a moment. “You want to go there?”

“Yes,” she says, because Luna likes it when she makes decisions. She says it’s important to ask for what you want. And Ginny’s curious, a bit. To stand at the edge of the world with Luna and look out, to only see water and sky and the side of Luna’s sweet, wide-eyed face.

It takes another hour to get there. Ginny doesn’t know how Luna knows the way and she doesn’t ask. She could nod off, probably, if she let herself, but she wants to be awake to listen as Luna tells her about the earth shifting deep beneath their feet over years and years and years. It could be troubling, the reminder that things have been here long before them and will continue to be after they’re gone. In the grand scheme of things, it makes Ginny feel insignificant, small compared to the kind of forces that can crack thick rock all the way to its core and send fragments tumbling into the sea, but it’s not a bad feeling. It’s a relief, that every tiny thing she’s ever worried about can be made trivial.

The site, as they discover when they reach it, has clearly been turned into some kind of attraction by the Muggles. There’s a car park and a little visitors centre and information posts, but it’s still too early for anyone to be about so it’s all empty, the windows of the hut dark. Luna ignores the signs and drives on, a little way away, right up to the edge of the cliff and onto the grass. There’s a steep, rocky precipice that drops off beneath them, but from the car they can just see the water and the sky, the panorama of it framed neatly in the windscreen.

Luna unbuckles her seatbelt. “I’ve got—” she says, leaning across Ginny to open the little compartment in the dashboard. She has four different boxes of tea crammed in there. Ginny laughs at her, charmed. Luna shrugs and twists to pull mugs out from the pocket on the back of her seat. One of them is wonky and clearly hand-made, the handle a crescent moon and Luna’s name painted onto its deep blue glaze in white, swirling letters. The other reads MY DAD WENT HUNTING FOR THE CRUMPLE-HORNED SNORKACK AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS MUG. Ginny gets the impression she’s looking at Luna’s parents, in drinkware form.

“Sun should be up soon,” Luna says. The blue is already starting to fade at the horizon line where the sky meets the sea. It’s always amazed Ginny, that line. How it’s reliably straight and perfect no matter how stormy either side gets. Like anything can be made simple if you look at it from far enough away.

They make hot water pour out of their wands for the tea, Ginny still revelling in the novelty of legally being allowed to perform magic whenever she likes. Luna’s smells sweet and warm, the steam rising in lemon-ginger-spiced curls. Ginny’s is peppermint, which makes her feel better about how her mouth is a little sour from the night, even if she hasn’t slept enough to develop actual morning breath. Especially because Luna turns in her seat and kisses her before long, like there’s no other way she’d rather spend the time until dawn breaks.

“This is the most southerly point in the country,” Luna says when she’s pulled back again. Ginny makes a noise at the separation and Luna climbs across until they’re sharing the passenger seat. There’s not enough room, Ginny squashed into the door, but they’ve been trying to exist in the same space all summer, to press close enough to inhabit each other’s bodies. They’re getting good at it.

“If you go that way,” Luna gestures ahead of them, folding herself down so she can tuck her head under Ginny’s chin. “It’s just water.”

“And France, eventually,” Ginny says, because she knows _some_ things.

Luna snorts and her breath is warm warm warm on the skin of Ginny’s neck. “Bon, si vous pinaillez.” (Fleur has been teaching her French, too. It’s a lot nicer to listen to than the Mermish, but Luna makes even that sound musical, the screeching softer in her lilting accent.)

“So basically,” Ginny says, pausing to press her mouth to the top of Luna’s head, to turn and rest her cheek against it after. “What you’re saying is everything is behind us.”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” says Luna, the smile audible in her voice, and the sky stains pink as the first rays of sun break over the horizon.

**Author's Note:**

> oh man i’m so soft for these two. feel free to leave a comment if you want to, i really love reading them -- you're all, truly, too sweet!!
> 
> (also: don’t have a playlist for this fic per se but i do have one about growing up and wishing you were still a kid who could go out and roll in the dirt and also a little bit about falling in love with your best friend, maybe….. [if you’re interested…](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1q3rmc135gMyn69vEplBqA?si=AhZwpDl8TcOntBICmJfsJQ))
> 
> [tumblr](https://forestgreenlesbian.tumblr.com/), if you want to say hi xxxxx


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